LOVE FOR SALE: BIG OIL COZIES UP TO VERNAL, UTAH
A Survival Guide for the Planet • published by the natural resources defense council
The Long Goodbye Scientist Eva Saulitis has dedicated her life to a vanishing group of orcas that survived the Exxon Valdez oil spill. TED GENOWAYS explores the poignant mystery of their intertwined lives.
A member of the nearly extinct AT1 group frolics in Alaska’s Prince William Sound.
PLUS spring 2013 www.onearth.org
CHICAGO reimagines its RIVER TWO CHEERS FOR THE SUBURBS! PENNSYLVANIA’S FRACK-TURED LANDSCAPE
contents
Onearth magazine
volume 35 number 1 spring 2013
FE A TURES
28 Frack Attack The Marcellus Shale
d e par t m ents cover story
40
After Katrina, the Big Easy became the Big Difficult. But it’s still a hell of a place.
Documentary Project spent a year photographing the all-too-visible impact of natural
17 FRONTLINES
gas drilling on Pennsylvania.
Everyone is desperate for rare earths—but we may not need them. Plus, a marine biologist dives into stand-up comedy.
Elizabeth Royte offers her take.
32 Cry Us a River
Q&A Ted Genoways interviews Eugenie Scott, who fought off the intelligent-design crowd and is now taking on climate-change skeptics.
by Matthew Power
Chicago’s modern-day planners must repair the damage
24 the synthesist
wrought by engineers who
by Alan Burdick Mouse-wielding urban planners, amateurs included, join forces to design the next New York City.
reversed the course of the Chicago River in 1900—a well-intentioned disaster.
26 think again
48 How Vernal, Utah, Learned to ª Big Oil by David Gessner
Every new oil and gas boom is accompanied by an elaborate courtship ritual aimed at winning the hearts of local people.
Eva Saulitis has come to know a group of seven surviving orcas as distinct individuals, each with his or her own nickname: Chenega, Iktua, Egagutak, Mike, Marie, Ewan, and Paddy.
But like too many affairs, this one may come to a rocky end.
The Woman Who Loves Orcas by Ted Genoways
inside n rdc
10 view from nrdc by Frances Beinecke
12 the deans list chris mueller
by Bob Deans
60 dispatches
Good news for couch potatoes; the trade in polar bears; and more.
8 From the Editor 14 WHERE ONEARTH
Back in 1979, a group of 22 orcas—killer whales—swam free in Alaska’s Prince William Sound. Then came the Exxon Valdez disaster, and now only seven remain. One day soon even these survivors will be gone. Eva Saulitis has devoted her life to the AT1s, as they are known, contemplating the mystery of their mortality—and her own.
Cover: Photograph by Cathy Hart/Alaska Stock
by Jeff Turrentine Memo to suburbanites: Don’t believe the tinfoil-helmet brigade; environmentalists don’t want to drive you from your homes.
56 reviews
Sit down to a delicious plateful of paint-thinner chemicals and texturing systems. Ah, the miracles of modern science.
64 open space
by Bruce Barcott In one Pacific Northwest town, is the stench of recycling making the local residents sick?
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spring 2013
onearth 1
A publication of the
n a t u r a l r e s o u r ce s d e f en s e c o u nc i l Editor-in-Chief Executive Editor
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ARTICLES Editor
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Janet Gold
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editor-at-large Ted Genoways Contributing Editors Bruce Barcott, Rick Bass, Michael Behar, Alan Burdick,
Craig Canine, Barr y Estabrook, Tim Folger, Susan Freinkel, David Gessner, Edward Hoagland, Sharon Levy, Bill McKibben, Mar y Oliver, Elizabeth Royte, Sharman Apt Russell, Alex Shoumatoff, Bruce Stutz, Laura Wright Treadway
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onearth is a quarterly magazine of thought and opinion on the environment. It is open to diverse points of view; the opinions expressed by contributors and the editors are their own and not necessarily those of NRDC. NRDC does not endorse the products or services that are advertised in the pages of onearth.
A bout N RD C NRDC is a national nonprofit organization with 1.3 million members and online activists, and a staff of lawyers, scientists, and other environmental specialists. NRDC’s mission is to safeguard the earth: its people, its plants and animals, and the natural systems on which all life depends. NRDC Office s 40 West 20th St. New York, NY 10011 212-727-2700
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onearth (issn 1537-4246) (volume 35, number 1) 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 2013 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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spring 2013
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EXCLUSIVES
Fracking the Amish
The Old Order Amish shun technology and conflict. But what happens when a nineteenth-century farming community is overrun by drilling rigs, heavy machinery, and landmen offering a fortune for mineral rights? Elizabeth Royte visits a town where the simple life just got complicated. onearth.org/13spr/amish
Planet Peep Show
On the North Dakota plains, enormous oil and gas rigs are lighting up the night sky—and showing up on satellite pics. In space, everyone can see you frack. onearth.org/13spr/fracking
Top left: lynn johnson; RIGHT: Jouko van der Kruijssen/sfwildlife.com; far right: Annie O’Neill
Our Favorite Badass Pioneer
Even with one arm, western crusader John Wesley Powell had no problem taking the fight to science-denying politicians. David Gessner explains why we could use someone like Powell to do battle with our current Congress. onearth.org/13spr/gessner
4F E A T U R E D
BLOGS
4mos t popula r
Antibacterial Soap: Safe Suds or Snake Oil?
Escape from the Jersey Shore Greenreads: The Best Environmental Journalism of 2012
Fracking Our Food Supply Why Big Ag Loves the Drought More online-only stories: onearth.org/webexclusives
onearth.org/blog
Otterly Adorable
The Other Red Meat
San Francisco has fallen in love with Sutro Sam, a river otter living in the ruins of the city’s nineteenth-century baths. But beware this cutie’s dark side: he’s a biter. onearth.org/13spr/otter
Could bugs really be the new beef? Mealworms are full of protein and more sustainable than many food sources. Still, Western palates say: ick. onearth.org/13spr/eatworms
Nothing excites us more than when LYNN JOHNSON visits our office to suggest another of her brilliantly inspired photo assignments. Johnson, who has shot for LIFE, Sports Illustrated, and National Geographic, was recently honored by her peers with the National Geographic Photographer’s Photographer Award. They cited her extraordinary humility and unique ability to capture people and relationships. We couldn’t agree more. And there is no better demonstration of her talent than the gripping online portfolio Johnson shot for us of an Amish community being torn asunder—literally and figuratively—by an influx of natural-gas rigs and money. See it: onearth. org/13spr/amishpix
spring 2013
onearth 5
contributors Elizabeth RoytE (“Frack Attack,” p. 28) is a contributing editor to OnEarth and the author of three critically acclaimed books on the environment. She also writes for the New York Times Magazine, National Geographic, Harper’s, and Outside. Her last article for OnEarth was our fall 2012 cover story, “Fresh Food for All.” Brian finke (“How Vernal, Utah, Learned to ª Big Oil,” p. 48) is a graduate of the School of Visual Arts in New York City. His monograph, 2468: American Cheerleaders and Football Players, was named one of the best photography books of 2004 by American Photo magazine. His awards include a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship.
todd essick (“Stop Me if You’ve Heard This One,” p. 21) was raised in the Chicago area and has worked in Miami for almost a decade. His underwater fine art photography has been published in magazines around the world, and in 2005 he was named one of the top 10 underwater photographers by the German dive magazine Unterwasser. 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.
finke: Adrienne Grunwald; zuckerman: Johansen Krause; essick: Carey Chen
Jocelyn Zuckerman (“Pretty Poison,” p. 56) is a Brooklynbased writer and editor. The former executive editor of Whole Living, she has written about the environment and the politics of food for Gourmet, the New York Times Magazine, and Fast Company. She was the author of OnEarth’s winter 2011/2012 cover story, “The Constant Gardeners.”
editor’s letter
F
does oil + money = love? or this issue, we asked a few of our contributors to show us what life
D o u g l as S . b aras c h
8 onearth
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Poon Watchara-Amphaiwan
is like on the frontiers of the newest oil and gas booms. I’m tempted to say the obvious—that it’s not a pretty picture. But the images we publish here of the fracking boom in Pennsylvania are beautiful (as photos). And the tale told by contributing editor DAVID GESSNER about the latest boom in Vernal, Utah, is beautiful too—a lyrical, evocative, often humorous account of what life is like in a town that gets wooed, then spurned (repeatedly) by Big Oil. Both Gessner’s prose and the photographs offer an intimate look at the consequences of our technologically sophisticated quest for fossil fuels. These are local stories. They’re not about climate change per se, or the impact of burning all that oil. Instead, they show vividly The town’s new state-of-the-art what is at stake in these particular places rec center, notes David Gessner, is for these people and their landscape. “the metaphoric equivalent of Big Oil Gessner sets out to visit Vernal with saying, ‘Here, honey, go buy yourself an open mind, and he makes good on his pledge to understand this “on-again, something nice’ ” off-again affair that has been going on for decades. It is that affair that interests me,” he writes, “with all the salacious details of how Big Oil sidles up to a town, flirts with it, and wins it over.” Ah, yes, the titillating details: “a golf tournament called Petroleum Days,” and a weekend-long music festival, the Country Explosion, “sponsored by a maker of centrifuges and mud/gas separators.” Then there are the people of Vernal, who run the gamut: some (Misty, George) are supportive of, some (Herm, Jeff) opposed to, the town’s cozy relationship with oil companies that furnish good-paying (though not necessarily long-lasting) jobs and fill coffers with tax revenues that helped build the town’s state-of-the-art recreation center. “The building,” Gessner notes, is “the metaphoric equivalent of Big Oil saying, ‘Here, honey, go buy yourself something nice.’ ” You can hardly fault people for wanting jobs or a new rec center. What choice do they have? Secretary of State John Kerry offered one answer at his confirmation hearing. “The solution to climate change is energy policy,” he said. In his home state of Massachusetts, he pointed out, “the fastest-growing sector of our economy is clean energy and energyefficiency companies.... I hope to sit with all of you and convince you that this $6 trillion [energy] market is worth millions of American jobs and leadership, and we better go after it.” That’s a pretty picture, to my mind—perhaps the most beautiful, most promising one of all. Finally, I’d like to correct two errors in our last issue. The Synthesist mistakenly stated that silicon degrades into “salicylic” acid; it degrades into silicic acid. Our Think Again essay noted that the 2,000 Watt Society encourages participants “to live on 2,000 watts of electricity per person, per year” and that Americans “average more than 10,000 watts a year.” Both statistics should have referred to an average, continuous (not yearly) figure. Sorry!
view from NRDC can we save the melting arctic before it’s too late? yes, we can the Arctic on a National Geographic photo assignment in 2005. Though a committed environmentalist, Balog thought most climate science was based on faulty computer models. Then he arrived in the Arctic and realized climate change wasn’t limited to research labs; it was altering the landscape before his eyes. Balog photographed receding glaciers and melting sea ice on that first trip, but he left thinking that still images couldn’t capture the scope of the transformation. He returned to the Arctic in 2007 with the filmmaker Jeff Orlowski and set up 27 time-lapse cameras. They compiled the images into a new movie called Chasing Ice, which reveals glaciers retreating at alarming rates, enormous chunks of frozen sea melting away, and lakes forming where once there was ice. The film is gorgeous, but it is terrifying. It is one of the most vivid depictions of climate change I have ever seen. Recent extreme weather events have revealed the destructive power of global warming; this film shows its speed. The entire Arctic region is changing at a rapid pace. Rising temperatures are heating the Arctic twice as fast as the rest of the planet, and Greenland is losing its ice at a rate If we don’t act now to keep the five times faster than it did 20 years ago. Polar bears, narwhals, and other icons Arctic from warming even further, we of the northern wilderness are finding risk despoiling this wild, majestic region their only natural habitats on this planet and destabilizing our climate for good quickly shrinking. And Arctic waters are becoming vulnerable to industrial fishing fleets and oil companies bent on exploiting places long sheltered in ice. If we don’t act now to keep the Arctic from warming even further, we risk despoiling this wild and majestic region and destabilizing our climate for good. For what happens in the Arctic has grave consequences for all of us. The Arctic is a bellwether for the world; as it warms it alters weather patterns in lower latitudes, contributing to extreme storms in our communities and rising sea levels along our coasts. We are confronting an immense challenge—but one that we must overcome. That’s why NRDC is creating a comprehensive model for Arctic stewardship. We are working to reduce the carbon pollution that is causing the Arctic to warm, and have proposed a cost-effective plan for the Environmental Protection Agency to limit carbon emissions from existing power plants—our nation’s largest source of global warming pollution. The proposal has already aroused considerable interest in Congress, the energy industry, and the media. We are also working to prevent industrial activity in the Arctic that would put this extraordinary and fragile place at risk. But we need your help to encourage leaders to take action, while we still can. Like Balog, I have traveled to the Arctic and been awed by its beauty and alarmed by its decline. I saw polar bears hunting seals, but I also observed scientists pointing to where the pack ice used to be. We must save this untamed place before it melts away.
francEs beinecke, President
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Matt Greenslade/photo-nyc.com
J
ames Balog was a climate-change skeptic when he first traveled to
the deans list
by bob deans
this historic climate moment pollution by 22 percent by 2020. The cost to industry? About to take action against climate change 1 percent of revenues. Every dollar that utilities invest to in his second term couldn’t have clean up their smokestacks and promote efficiency in our come at a more pivotal moment. workplaces and homes would return up to $15 in public “Some may still deny the overwhelm- health and carbon-reduction benefits. That’s because, in the process of reducing carbon polluing judgment of science,” Obama said in his second inaugural address, tion, we’d also cut down on the amount of mercury, sulfur “but none can avoid the devastating dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and other pollutants that power impact of raging fires and crippling plants dump into our air. Those pollutants contribute to drought and more powerful storms.” thousands of premature deaths and hospital visits annuIndeed, last year was the hottest on record across the ally. Reducing those deaths and emergency room visits continental United States, where the average annual tem- would save scores of billions of dollars a year, according perature was 3.2 degrees above the twentieth-century to an analysis by the Environmental Protection Agency. The Clean Air Act gives the EPA authority to set carbon renorm; 2012 concluded the nation’s hottest decade ever. Alltime highs were set in more than 100 places last summer. duction goals that are tailored to each state’s specific energy mix and that let utilities find the most cost-effective way to It was 112 degrees in Georgia; in Kansas, it reached 118. hit the target. Among American farmthe choices: clean ers lost half their Climate chaos is literally sweeping up existing plants by corn and 59 percent the country. Small wonder an AP poll improving combusof their pastureland, tion or installing antiwiped out by the found that nearly four out of five pollution gear; shift worst drought in half Americans think we must take action the generation mix a century. From the against climate change. toward low-carbon Rocky Mountains to options such as solar the Ohio River Valley, ranchers unable to feed their herds thinned or liquidated and wind; and promote energy efficiency, which reduces stocks, often at a loss. Wildfires burned 9.2 million acres consumer demand. American families could save more of forests and fields. By summer’s end, Arctic sea ice had than $700 a year on their electric bills if utilities did more to promote basic measures such as weatherizing homes and melted to its lowest level ever. And in October, more than 130 Americans were killed installing energy-efficient appliances and lightbulbs. In his historic second inaugural address, President when Hurricane Sandy battered the Eastern Seaboard, causing tens of thousands of people to lose their homes, more Obama called the nation to action on the urgent threat of than $80 billion in damage, and 14-foot storm surges in lower climate change. Now it’s time to follow through by cutting Manhattan. Climate chaos is, literally, sweeping the country. the pollution from our power plants, the single largest Small wonder an Associated Press poll in early Decem- source of the carbon emissions that are warming our planet ber found that nearly four out of five Americans believe and threatening us all. We know where this carbon polluWashington must take action against climate change. tion comes from, we have the power to clean it up, and we The single most important step we could take would be have a president who understands the stakes—altogether, to reduce the carbon pollution from our power plants. And a rare opportunity for real progress. we can do that in a way that saves lives, creates thousands of clean-energy jobs, and trims household electric bills. Bob Deans, NRDC’s director of federal communications, is a Power plants—mostly those fueled by coal—account for veteran newspaper reporter and a former president of the White nearly 40 percent of U.S. carbon emissions. Using his author- House Correspondents’ Association. His most recent book is Reckless: ity under the Clean Air Act, President Obama can cut that The Political Assault on the American Environment.
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illustration by bruce morser
President Obama’s promise
where onearth
MORNING INTERLUDE Bourbon Street, raucous by night, radiates a quiet, stately beauty at dawn.
N
Yes, New Orleans is living large—giving its heart to all, cher B y c h ri s ro s e
ew Orleans looks just how you want it to look (lush,
gaudy, old); smells how you want it to smell (sweet olive, fish fry, river water); sounds like you want it to sound (music falls from the sky like rain here); tastes like you want it to taste (peppers, pork fat, bourbon). When it comes to distilling the essence of New Orleans in words and images, it’s hard to avoid clichés: trumpets, riverboats, jazz funerals, streetcars, cemeteries, Cajuns, alligators, voodoo, gumbo, Mardi Gras. (And, of course, Katrina: our crucible, where our resolve was tested and our rebirth staged.) But here’s the truth: all these things are actually regarded by New Orleanians as the articles of faith, sacred traditions, and commodities that define daily life here. Some of my neighbors really do sport seersucker and linen from Memorial Day to Labor Day. We really do munch beignets (washed down with chicory coffee) for breakfast. And we really do head to the French Quarter for a lunch of red beans and rice, making our way past the street-corner brass bands, the tap dancing kids, the sidewalk psychics and the shoeshine grifters and the . . . You get the picture, right? Now, if you really can’t make it down for Mardi Gras, there’s another annual event that does a fantastic job of distilling for visitors this city’s unparalleled music, food, dance, congeniality, and general insouciance: the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival. Held here every spring, from the last weekend in April through the first weekend in May, it’s New Orleans at her finest hour—and, quite frankly, the best music festival in the world.
sos
After the Flood One of the biggest challenges New
Orleanians faced in the wake of Hurricane Katrina was weighing the city’s storied past against possible futures. The conversation between affected communities—which is ongoing—hasn’t been free of tension. But factions as disparate as Uptown’s patrician swells and the Marigny’s boho-hipsters can agree that the devastation wrought by Katrina has given residents an opportunity to rethink infrastructure and urban planning without sacrificing the city’s eclectic (and revenue-generating) character. One model is being provided by the Urban Conservancy (urbanconservancy.org), which is helping transform an abandoned rail and canal corridor running from the French Quarter to the once-flood-ravaged Lakeview section into a lush trail that cuts through a half-dozen of the city’s oldest, most interesting neighborhoods.
dine at Jacques Imo’s, near the streetcar line Uptown, where the shrimp-and-alligator-sausage cheesecake dazzles the senses. jacques-imos.com dance to Gypsy jazz and Creole swing on the tiny, jump-jiving dance floor at the Spotted Cat on trendy Frenchmen Street. spottedcatmusicclub.com drink at Bar Tonique, on the fringe of the Quarter, where house-blended bitters and mysterious herbal concoctions induce nirvana. bartonique.com 1 4 onearth
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Denis Jr. Tangney/Getty Images
so is it still the big easy?
spring 2013
s c i e n c e b u s i n e s s n a t u r e t e c h n o l o g y c u l t u r e p o l i t i c s
will superscientistS save the day?
C
illustration by ellen weinstEin; STATISTICS: u.s. geological survey
by bruce stutz
Magnets made from rare-earth elements have been key to green technology—and notoriously difficult to obtain. Researchers are searching for a better way.
makes them essential components of the tiny, superpowerful magnets that are crucial to the performance of computers, hybrid and electric getting our hands a little dirty. Finding, mining, cars, and wind turbine generators. Though not technically rare, these refining, and processing the metals needed to pro17 elements (including neodymium, dysprosium, and praseodymium, duce everything from wind turbines to compact to name a polysyllabic few) are almost never found in concentrated fluorescent bulbs can be a messy business. The deposits—making them difficult, expensive, and typical hybrid car, for example, often environmentally damaging to extract. requires nearly 100 pounds of copLearn more about rare earths’ As it is, the global supply of rare earths happens per. To make our solar panels and role in our high-tech economy at to line up nicely, more or less, with global demand. light-emitting diodes, we need eleonearth.org/13spr/rareearths But here’s the problem—at least from the point ments like gallium, indium, tellurium, and selenium: of view of all but one of the world’s industrialized nations: fully by-products of mined metals such as copper and zinc. 95 percent of the global supply of rare earths comes out of the mines And then there’s that subcategory of energy-critical elements known in a single country, China, which then uses them to manufacture some as rare earths. The unique manner in which their electrons are arrayed
13
lean technology, so far, has meant
.org
metric tons of extractable RARE earths BELIEVED TO BE on U.S. lands (In MILLIONS)
0
metric tons of rare earths mined from U.S. LANDS in 2011
$696
value of refined rare earths imported bY the u.s. in 2011 (in millions)
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F RONTLINES
good finds
75 percent of the world’s neodymium magnets. And while deposits do exist in the United States (some analysts estimate that up to 13 percent of the world’s reserves may lie within our borders), the technological expertise and industrial infrastructure required to manufacture rare-earth magnets do not. Many of the rare earths mined in the United States, in fact, must be sent to China to be processed. It’s enough to make some people a little nervous. “In five to fifteen years we’ll face the risk of shortfalls or disruptions of supplies of some rare earths and other critical materials,” warns Mark Johnson of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy. In 2011 this very concern led the agency to invest approximately $30 million in 14 different projects, all geared toward spurring innovation that would alleviate the pressure to mine, process, or purchase rare earths.
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a clear vision Fans of Eco, the brand of stylish eyewear made from 95 percent recycled materials, include Leonardo DiCaprio. Among other things, they like that the company plants a tree for every set of frames sold— more than 600,000 so far. eco-optics.com
Since rare earths are so hard to come by, why not just try to copy them?
”
Organized under the banner of Rare Earth Alternatives in Critical Technologies (REACT), these projects, says Johnson, have the potential to “solve scientific questions and create new opportunities.” Foremost among those questions is: since rare earths are so hard to come by, why not just try to copy them? Scientists are now racing to see if other metals can be tinkered with in such a way as to render whatever magnets we might make from them rare-earth strong—with the added benefit that these magnets would come from some of the most abundant elements on earth: iron, aluminum, even carbon. Already, one team has learned how to control certain properties of non–rare earth magnets to greatly improve their performance at high temperatures. Still other teams are asking whether magnets are even necessary in these technologies; one has prototyped an electric motor that requires none of the neodymium-based permanent magnets currently found in our most popular hybrid and electric cars. Johnson makes clear that the ultimate goal is to find “the innovation that will change the game.” Given that the clock is running out, the other team has the ball, and we’re playing for the very future of clean technology, a game-changer is clearly what’s needed. Bruce Stutz is a contributing editor to OnEarth. His most recent article was “Isn’t It Romantic?” (Fall 2012).
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power plant
M
ore than 3,000 years ago, CERTAIN civilizations in Asia and the Middle East began boiling the roots of the madder plant to dye fabrics in bright hues. Now this common climbing herb, a member of the genus Rubia, is showing its true colors as a potential source of material for sustainable lithium-ion batteries. Chemists at New York’s City College, working with researchers from the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and Rice University, have developed a battery that gets its juice by pairing lithium with purpurin, the same compound found in the colorful dye extracted from madder roots. Currently, cobalt is used to make electrodes for most lithium-ion batteries but the energy we expend processing and recycling this mined metal causes 159 pounds of CO2 to enter the earth’s atmosphere for every kilowatt-hour of stored battery energy. Researchers confidently predict that a commercial-scale purpurin battery is only a few years away, leading to the enticing image of acre after planted acre of madder root “battery farms.” Our cultivated fields of future cell-phone parts could even act as carbon sinks. It all sounds absolutely —jon mark ponder to dye for.
keeping it reel No planets were harmed in the making of these motion pictures. If you happen to find yourself in Washington, D.C., March 12–24, be sure to check out what’s being screened at the 21st annual Environmental Film Festival in the Nation’s Capital. dcenvironmental filmfest.org
thinking inside the box
T
he Boomerang Box, which is crafted
from cardboard made with 50 percent postconsumer content, has sturdy sides that taper inward, allowing empty boxes to be stacked vertically, just like paper cups. The office-supply giant OfficeMax has launched a program for its business customers in which drivers will retrieve these spacesaving, easy-to-store empties with each new delivery so that they can be reused—up to 10 times apiece. officemaxsolutions.com —CHASE SCHEINBAUM
framework for interpreting and conveying those data. In 2012, recognizing that familiar social controversies were beginning to cloud the “substantial scientific agreement about the occurrence, causes, and consequences of climate change,” NCSE launched a new initiative to defend and support the teaching of the subject in public schools. I had planned to travel to San
“
is to say that teachers should be able to teach evolution but that they should balance it by also teaching the evidence against evolution, its so-called weaknesses. There’s a whole taxonomy of phrases creationists use to describe it, but basically they want teachers to have to make the same old arguments for intelligent design or creation science. Now, however, they’re calling
Students shouldn’t be debating whether living things have common ancestors, or whether the earth is getting warmer no bones about it
Eugenie Scott makes sure classroom science isn’t compromised.
evolving strategy
Opposite page, right: blickwinkel/ Alamy; photograph for onearth by Anne Hamersky
As anti-science forces challenge the teaching of climate change in the public schools, a scientist fights back I n 1971 Eugenie Scott was a graduate student in physical anthropology at the University of Missouri. One day her mentor handed her a stack of literature from an organization calling itself the Institute for Creation Research. “Take a look at these,” he Ted Genoways said. “It’s called ‘creation science.’” talks to She started going through the pameugenie scott phlets. “I was just hooked,” she told me. “It was so fascinating. Here I was studying to be a scientist, and these people were claiming to be doing science—but, boy, were we doing different stuff.” Scott soon realized that these so-called creation scientists were looking at much of the same data she was studying—“the same fossils, the same stratigraphy, the same biological principles”—but coming to dramatically different conclusions. At times they seemed to be inviting a debate over the scientific method itself, especially its ironclad tenet that evidence alone determines the worthiness of any hypothesis. In her work ever since, including her 26 years as the executive director of the National Center for Science Education, Scott has tracked the shifting strategies of the creationist movement in an effort to arm educators not only with accurate data but also with a scientific
Francisco to discuss this expansion—but Scott, ever the instructor, insisted on communicating via Skype. “Why should somebody travel halfway across the country for an interview when they could do this electronically and save a huge carbon footprint?” she asked. And so we spoke, face-to-face, she from her office computer in the Bay Area and I from mine in Nebraska. During your tenure, NCSE has been engaged in many high-profile battles over the teaching of creationism in public schools. Each new iteration— starting with “creation science,” then “intelligent design,” and now “teaching the controversy”—seems designed to further conceal any religious underpinnings to help it pass constitutional muster. How has the strategy changed?
The Establishment Clause of the First Amendment provides that public schools and other governmental offices can neither advance nor impede, neither establish nor inhibit, religion. You have to be religiously neutral in the public schools. Courts have held that teaching any kind of creationism constitutes religious advocacy. The creationist strategy du jour
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them arguments “against” evolution. By concealing religion even more, they’re hoping to avoid that First Amendment challenge. And now you’ve found that similar battles are brewing over the teaching of climate change in public schools. In response, NCSE has recently launched a climate change education initiative.
We added climate change to our portfolio, if you will, because we were getting a lot of reports from teachers around the country who were being leaned on for teaching climate science. A teacher might mention global warming, for example, and a kid would raise his hand and say, “My dad says that Fox News told him it’s a hoax.” That makes it harder for teachers to teach, and some teachers are intimidated. It’s in NCSE’s particular DNA to help citizens, teachers, school boards, and concerned people at the grassroots level cope with these kinds of political pressures. Can we give information to a teacher, say, that will help her convince the principal why Johnny shouldn’t be allowed to “opt out” whenever she talks about climate change? Can we
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help local citizens to craft an argument that would persuade their school board to avoid passing a wrongheaded policy? How are the climate-change deniers organizing and operating? And how do you plan to counter their efforts?
They might say: “Well, that’s just one scientist’s opinion. We still don’t have enough data.”
Science is a powerful cultural institution; it’s easy to see why anyone would want to glom on to it to promote a particular position. When we announced that we were going to be taking on climate change, we got a number of letters from people saying, “How could you fall for that hoax? You guys do such good work on evolution!” But just as the scientific consensus is that evolution happened, the scientific consensus is also that global warming is happening. Why wouldn’t you accept the scientific consensus for both?
A few years ago we began noticing that the anti‑evolution legislation that annually crops up in state legislatures was being bundled with legislation against the teaching of global warming. Christian fundamentalists were expanding their scope to include climate change, in an effort to broaden The compromise their coalition that Nebraskans Find Ted Genoways in conversaby bringing in seem to have tion with other newsmakers at members of struck with reonearth.org/tedqas the business gard to climate community. change in the classroom is that, So we’ve expanded ours too. for now at least, it’s going to be We’ve had to seek common taught as part of the social studies ground with those business- curriculum, where it will be menminded Republicans and liber- tioned as one of several challenges tarians who accept the science to agriculture. Doesn’t placing it on climate change. But that’s within social studies suggest that what politics is all about. You go climate change is a debatable isout and find, say, those conser- sue rather than an established fact? vative Christians who are will- The “fairness” meme is popular ing to talk about why believing in the United States—and by and in evolution doesn’t necessarily large, it’s a really good idea. Balrequire you to give up your faith. ance is important. I want to know And then you go out and find other people’s points of view. those Republican lawmakers or But at the K–12 level, students business leaders who are willing shouldn’t be debating whether to make the case to their fellow living things have common ancesRepublicans that, yes, you can be tors. And they shouldn’t be debata good Republican and still accept ing whether the earth is getting the reality of global warming. warmer. They can debate arguments within evolution or climate change. Were dinosaurs warmIn Nebraska, where I live, legislators may be perfectly happy to talk about blooded or cold-blooded? That’s a great critical-thinking exercise scientific evidence when they’re discussing something like agricul- for kids. With regard to climate tural policy, so long as the scientific change, is the sea level going to consensus suits their purposes. But rise two inches or six? What are the data? That’s a great exercise. if science comes back to them and We want to teach our kids to says, “We need to do things differbe critical thinkers. But we want ently,” in a way that runs contrary them to be critical thinkers about to how business or Big Agriculture things that are actually in dispute. prefers them, then their tone shifts.
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shells of montezuma The U.S. Marine Corps is tasked with looking out for all Americans, including reptilian ones
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he Desert Tortoise, native to the Mojave and
Sonoran deserts of the southwestern United States, is an officially threatened species. Now, happily, some 500 leathery hatchlings have come under the protection of none other than the fighting leathernecks. That’s right: the U.S. Marine Corps has been tasked with watching over a population of the reptiles on its sprawling base in Twentynine Palms, California. In the few years since the Marines joined efforts with biologists from the University of California, Los Angeles, baby tortoises have been living trouble-free in a five-acre refuge inside the base. Their daily food and water needs, obviously, are met; but just as significant to their well-being is the wireand-netting barrier that keeps out such predators as lizards, dogs, and—especially—ravens. Of course, tanks and Humvees on the 900-plus-square-mile Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center can make tortoises’ lives difficult too. That’s why Marines have standing orders to halt any drill and immediately notify their range master at the mere sight of one. Currently, 90 percent of Marines deployed overseas go through Twentynine Palms; during boot camp, they’re shown a video about the plight of the tortoise and their duty as its protectors. To “raven-proof” the base, Marines collect food litter, secure trash-can lids, and even distribute blatantly anti-raven propaganda to grunts. And then, once the hatchlings’ shells are sufficiently thick, the creatures are released from the protected area to the base at large, where they’re given permis—C.S. sion—from high command—to roam freely.
illustration by john nickle; right: photograph for onearth by todd essick
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sink or swim
The comedian’s credits include working to save endangered manatees.
stop me if you’ve heard this one Funny but true: Forrest Shaw traded his marine biologist’s lab coat for a comedian’s microphone
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By kyle munzenrieder
fter beginning his set by making the
obligatory jokes about sex, drugs, and aging, Forrest Shaw abruptly announces that before embarking on his stand-up career, he worked for more than a decade as a marine biologist. The crowd at the Fort Lauderdale Improv falls silent: a terrifying moment for any comedian. But minutes later, Shaw has them laughing again as he energetically riffs on a number of green-rooted topics, including his preference for recycling bins with lids (“Who wants the neighborhood to see all your empty liquor bottles anyway?”) and the tragicomic dilemma befalling the grocery shopper who aspires to buy organic but can’t always afford to. (“You just look around like it’s a museum. ‘All right, I’m going to go to the celery exhibit next.’ ”) A midcareer transition from environmental science to stand-up comedy may not sound like a natural move. But Shaw, raised in Miami by a single “hippie mother” with a razor-sharp sense of humor, grew up in a world where the name “Carson” could refer to either Johnny or Rachel. After graduating from Ithaca College with a degree in environmental biology, he held
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a series of related jobs—in the course of which, he says, he had his first encounters with tough crowds. “I worked for the National Audubon Society, taking kids on field trips,” he says. That job is tough enough as it is, but in Shaw’s unfortunate case, “it was junior high school kids. You’re trying to teach them about aquifers; meanwhile, their hormones are going crazy. They’re making out with each other while you’re taking them on a tour of an Everglades hammock.” Eventually he landed at Miami-Dade County’s Department of Environmental Resources Management, working his way up the chain as a biologist with a specialty in sea grass. He also helped protect endangered manatees, animals whose blissfully unabashed mating habits often made for some unintentional R-rated comedy. “Little kids going by on bikes would ask us what was going on,” he recalls. “It was an awkward situation.” Decorum always prevailed, although Shaw can now freely admit the simple truth: manatees “are just horny animals. What are you going to do?” He never grew tired of the job, he says, but when a beloved grandfather passed away, Shaw decided to rethink his life goals. “He was one
For five years, while counting sea grass strands by day, Shaw worked the local comedy clubs at night
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APPROPOS
of those guys that did everything he wanted to do in life. And I remember thinking: I’m going to get old, and I’m not going to have done the things I want to do. So I made a list. Stand-up comedy was the first thing on it.” For five years, while counting sea grass strands by day, Shaw worked the local comedy clubs at night and hit the road on weekends. In 2010, he decided to make the leap and dedicate himself to comedy full time. Material drawn from his environmental-science background didn’t make it into his sets at first. Shaw quickly realized that without the right touch—which is to say, a light touch—comedy-club crowds were about as eager to hear environmentally themed jokes as hormonally distracted junior high kids were to learn about aquifer formation. “When I tried to do jokes about the environment,” he says, “it would eventually turn into: ‘And another thing, you’ve got to recycle your oil.’ Everyone was just, like, ‘Shut up.’” It took Shaw a while to find the right tone, one that would make people laugh and make them think. “I want to make stuff funny, not like a lecture,” he says. “You don’t just want to beat stuff into their heads.” Shaw’s background in marine science helped him land a spot on the 2009–2010 All Organic Comedy Tour, made up of five comedians who mined (always sustainably!) the vein of modern environmentalism for laughs. He’s currently putting together a web-based series that blends travel and satire. And while he has finally figured out how to incorporate environmentalist humor into his sets, Shaw wants to make it very clear that no one should expect the material to dominate his stand-up routine. “You can’t talk about the environment for 45 minutes on stage,” he says. “You just can’t do that to an audience. I don’t think the greenest person alive could stand that.” 2 2 onearth
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What it’s called: How’s My Waterway? Compatible with: Android, Apple What it does: Lets users learn about the health of lakes, rivers, or streams within a fivemile radius of any zip code, including pollution assessment status and abatement measures How much it costs:
SPIES IN THE SKIES
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as the new civilian regulations for flying the miniature, unmanned planes are approved in 2015, expect to see them employed in a different kind of warfare: on environmental enemies. Conservationists abroad are already swapping muddy boots for remote controls. In Asia and Africa last year, drones helped track populations of orangutans, rhinos, tigers, and sea turtles. Domestically, they’ve been authorized to map the habitat of pygmy rabbits in Idaho; another planned project would have them monitoring the activity of salmon-eating cormorants off the Oregon coast. (Smile for the birdie, birdie!) —MELISSA MAHONY
Free SPOTLIGHT The forest floor is the setting for Epic, an animated fantasy from the director of Ice Age and featuring the voices of Beyoncé and Colin Farrell. The film, in which a girl is thrust into a war “between the forces of good who keep the natural world alive and the forces of evil who wish to destroy it,” opens May 24.
rones are about to become declassified. AS SOON
A BLOOMIN’ TRAGEDY
Years
Peak Bloom
1950-1979 April 7
1980-2009 April 2
2010-2039
March 31
2040-2069
March 19
2070-2099
March 4
The explosion of cherry blossoms around the tidal basin in Washington, D.C., each spring is taking place earlier and earlier. Peak bloom dates for the area’s Yoshino cherry trees are steadily creeping backward on the calendar, thanks to a warmer atmosphere that “tells” the trees’ buds when springlike weather has arrived. An international team of scientists has projected just how much earlier peak bloom dates could fall throughout the remainder of the century, should we fail to address climate change by altering our energy production and consumption habits, among other factors.
graph Statistics: u.s. National Park Service and PLOS ONE; above: illustration by Michael Waraksa
F RONTLINES
you’re onearth enter our photography contest
winner: Ralf Burgert camera: Olympus SP320 about THE photo: Though winter storms can bring snow, ice, and strong winds to the high desert of California’s Joshua Tree National Park, visitors are rewarded with dramatic clouds, heavenly light, and stupendous vistas. After one storm, a few hikers took advantage of the returning sun for some late-day climbing.
Sponsored by
how to win
Share your best photographs of life on earth with us: images of wildlife habitat, but also human habitat and wherever the two meet (harmoniously or inharmoniously). We’re looking for scenes with a strong visual point of view, attitude, and, of course, beauty. The winning photo will be published in OnEarth magazine, and the runnerup will be featured online at onearth.org. submit your photos and see contest rules at onearth.org/photocontest
Contest winner will receive a FREE trip for two to any Caravan Tours destination: Costa Rica, Guatemala, Canadian Rockies, Grand Canyon, Nova Scotia, New England & Fall Foliage—valued up to $5,000. Second-place winner will receive a pair of Vanguard Endeavor ED binoculars (value: $425). Spring 2013
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the synthesist
by alan burdick
a rotating, vine-covered spheroid (“Verde Tower”), or even a giant statue of a gorilla near the Brooklyn Bridge (“King Kong”), have at it. Betaville is perhaps the most ambitious manifestation of open-source urbanism, a movement among academics, designers, engineers, and city planners to help citizens get involved in how their environments are constructed. In certain ways, the Internet is already like a city: diverse, densely networked, and filled with voices clamoring for attention. Why not weld the online to the offline and crowdsource the metropolis? We’re already comfortable with things like street-mapping services, Google Earth plug-ins, and phone-based apps that help us steer our way through local traffic or find the best shoe-repair shop—all based on real-time input from other users. Such efforts succeed largely by ignoring the physicality of physical space; they can help us navigate it, simulate it, or assign value to it, but they don’t enable (or expect) us to add to it or improve it in any palpable way. That may be changing, however, with the rise of forums like Change By Us NYC, a website and mobile platform that matches individuals to neighborhood-improvement efforts. The site, developed two years ago by Local Projects, a media-design company in New York, was particularly busy after Hurricane Sandy, as New Yorkers eagerly sought ways to aid the recovery. “This is how the message will get out about sustainability,” Jake Barton, the founder and principal of Local Projects, says. “It’s not about top-down. It’s about a person taking action and amplifying it to an ever-larger audience.” Betaville extends this ideal even further into the physical realm. In one specialized corner of the open-source platform, for instance, a consoretaville, like any city, is incomplete: tium of designers in five cities around the world—New York; Bremen; it lives for tomorrow. For now it’s purely virtual— Istanbul; Siracusa, Italy; and Busan, South Korea—has already begun a digital, three-dimensional model of New York City that anyone can download, tweak, and mod- exchanging notes on how to improve the cities’ respective waterfronts. ify. It arose in 2009 as a collaboration between With 2,600 users, of whom only a few dozen might be considered truly the Polytechnic Institute of New York University active, Betaville isn’t yet a bustling meta-metropolis. Navigation isn’t and Bremen University of Applied Sciences in as intuitive as it might be, either. And actually “building” something in Germany. The goal was to create an open-source Betaville requires at least some degree of familiarity with the basics of computer-assisted design. “You still need to know where you’re going platform where architects and planners could present mock-ups for buildings, artworks, and other development projects, collecting valu- in order to work there,” Skelton concedes. But he has faith that Betaville—founded on the idea that improveable feedback from colleagues and visitors. Carl Skelton, who directs ment is an evolutionary, multi-party process—will keep getting better. the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center at NYU-Poly and is one of For one thing, it’s based on Geographic Information System (GIS) Betaville’s founding fathers, says the project illustrates that “there’s standards, meaning that it can incorporate realno technological reason why reimagining the form, world data. One planned upgrade will allow it to tap function, and symbolic environment of a physical city For more on the intersection of techinto New York City’s housing database; when you can’t be a social medium.” nology, culture, and the environment, click on a building, you’ll be able to call up its floor The streets of Betaville are lined with digitized trees visit onearth.org/scitech area ratio or see if its boiler is burning dirty No. 6 and the counterparts of brick-and-mortar buildings. diesel, as many older buildings still do. Skelton sees no reason why Floating triangles mark sites where dream projects are presented for environmental data can’t be poured in too—to model the flow of air public evaluation; just click and a designer’s submission appears, along pollution through the city, say, or to study how to mitigate the effects with a description and any commentary that the proposal has elicited of rising sea levels. Gradually, with enough collective effort and the up to that point. “Liberty Piers,” for instance, extends into the harbor below Manhattan’s Battery Park like the five-pointed crown of the nearby right data, Betaville will become even more like the real New York: Statue of Liberty. “Green FDR,” on the East River between Manhattan ambitious, optimistic, great. and Brooklyn, is a green space and esplanade that would help temper the unfortunate effect of the elevated FDR Drive (an “evil giant view- Alan Burdick, a senior editor at the New Yorker and a regular OnEarth blocker,” according to Green FDR’s creator). If you feel like designing contributor, is the author of Out of Eden (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
the wiki city
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illustration by jesse lefkowitz
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Neighborhood watch
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by jeff turrentine
ssst! Have you heard about
Agenda 21? The secret plot to collectivize private property—hatched
by United Nations internationalists and midwifed by operatives ensconced within our own govern-
ment—all in the name of “ending sprawl” and “encouraging sustainability”? The seizure of suburban homes by jackbooted, gun-toting U.N. thugs? The involuntary relocation of displaced suburbanites to cramped dwellings in densely packed cities? 2 6 onearth
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No? Seriously? You haven’t heard about any of this? Don’t blame Glenn Beck. His magazine, The Blaze, put Agenda 21 on the cover of its January/February 2012 issue; the article contained therein, its editors promised, would expose “the global scheme that has the potential to wipe out freedoms of all U.S. citizens.” Beck then stretched this warning into a dystopian science fiction novel that came out last November titled (what else?) Agenda 21. In it, suburban and rural homeowners are stripped of their property and carted off to overcrowded cities, where they’re forced to live in bunker-like apartments, wear government-issued uniforms, and generate power for the grid by walking on piezoelectric “energy boards.” In truth, Agenda 21 is the sort of nonbinding, suggestion-filled “action plan” the United Nations generates whenever it holds any kind of major international summit. It emerged from the U.N. Conference on Environment and Development, held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992 and dedicated to addressing the most vexing environmental problems of the time. Beck, who has made a fine living catering to the tinfoil-hat crowd, is trying to pass off U.N. bullet points as a precursor to real bullets. But you don’t have to believe the folks in the black helicopters are eyeing your redwood deck as a future landing pad in order to push the theory that a cabal of environmentalists and elected officials has it in for the ’burbs, and won’t rest until every last Olive Garden in America is razed and turned into, well, an actual olive garden. Last August, Stanley Kurtz, who has lectured at Harvard and the University of Chicago, wrote an article for the stalwart conservative journal National Review that appeared under the provocative headline “Burn Down the Suburbs?” It opened with a zinger: “President Obama is not a fan of America’s suburbs. Indeed, he intends to abolish them.” Kurtz’s article was in many ways a rehash of observations made previously by Joel Kotkin, a writer who specializes in analyzing demographic shifts in cities and suburbs. In 2010 Kotkin, a former New York Times columnist, wrote on his blog that “for the first time in memory, the suburbs are under a conscious and sustained attack from Washington.” He later told one interviewer that the Obama administration was “the first anti-suburban administration in American history.” For Beck, Kurtz, and Kotkin, all the evidence one needs to back up such breathless assertions can be found in the language of sustainability and “smart growth” used by environmentalists and their allies in government. Alas, what’s being heard and what’s actually being said are two different things. The champion of sustainability says: “We need to reduce sprawl by encouraging greater density.” But the anxious suburbanite hears: “We’re tearing down the houses on your cul-de-sac and replacing them with a 20-story Brutalist apartment building, complete with its own wastewater treatment plant.” The champion of sustainability says: “It’s time to shift from last century’s car culture to the new century’s culture of mass transit.” The anxious suburbanite hears: “We’ll be sending someone around for your Escalade shortly. Fortunately for you, the D train will soon be stopping at your new building—right next to your on-site methadone clinic!” As someone who was raised in the suburbs and still has deep family roots there, I think I know what’s fueling this anxiety. And instead of scoffing at it, I believe the champions of sustainability should be em-
illustration by peter horjus
think again
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phasizing how ideas that fall under the rubric of smart and those vehicles now jam the single artery leadJeff Turrentine offers new perspectives growth benefit all of us, wherever we reside. Their ing into and out of town. More than three-quarters on the man-made environment in his new message needs to be: if you really love your blog at onearth.org/humanlandscape of these drivers are solo commuters; fewer than suburban quality of life, then know that the greatest 10 percent carpool. What used to be a half-hour drive threat to it isn’t coming from bureaucrats, environmentalists, or liberal to and from central Austin can now take twice as long. politicians. It’s coming from that brand new, almost-completed housing Did you move to the suburbs for safety and stability? Perpetrators of development going up right next to yours. property crimes love sprawl; it’s great for business. The combination Did you move to the outskirts of town to be closer to nature? So did of low-density, single-family housing with an absence of pedestrian my parents, who relocated from Dallas to a quiet lakeside community culture means more back doors for the jimmying and more windows in the Texas Hill Country in 1997. Back then, the 15-mile drive to their for the breaking, all conveniently hidden from the eyes and ears of house from central Austin took 30 minutes and led you through farm- potential witnesses. From 2001 to 2011, my parents’ idyllic community land, ranchland, and protected wildlife habitat. A peaceful after-dinner saw its own crime index rise substantially. drive to “count the deer” was a favorite pastime. “It wasn’t considered Sprawl destroys the defining character of suburbs by conferring a good night if we didn’t count at least a hundred,” my mother recalls. upon them many problems associated with urban areas: crime, conNow, she says, they’re lucky if they see three or four. Between 1990 gestion, paved-over wilderness. And yet Stanley Kurtz assails urban and 2010, the human population of their community grew by more than growth boundaries—which draw a literal line in the sand, then limit 240 percent—turning it from a quiet refuge to a busy exurb. Once, my development beyond it—as a liberal scheme “to force suburban resiparents could look outside their window and see green hillsides; now “it’s dents into densely packed cities.” But if that’s true, why did the citizens just the rooftops” of the more than 2,000 single-family homes permitted of conservative Virginia Beach, Virginia, establish one back in 1979? for construction since the year they moved in. The answer is that their “green line,” which has restricted sprawl to the Did you escape to the suburbs because you hated big-city traffic? city’s northern half, has preserved the unique agricultural character Even if all the deer hadn’t been run out of my parents’ exurb, there’s no of the southern half; as a result, today there are nearly 170 working such thing as a “peaceful after-dinner drive” near their home anymore. farms within the city limits. Similarly, these boundaries didn’t seem so The residents of their community average 2.6 vehicles per household, sinister to the Tennessee General Assembly, which passed a law in 1998 requiring every independent county in the state to adopt them, explicitly citing a statewide need to “minimize urban sprawl.” S HORT TA K E Mass transit, too, offers far-flung suburbanites relief from sprawl’s ill effects, in this case by reducing their commute times and increasing the amount of time they get to spend at home. So why would Joel Kotkin blithely dismiss it as “offer[ing] little to anyone who lives outThe people who run America’s suburbs side a handful of large metropolitan cores”? Has he ever talked to an exasperated exurban commuter? The first decade of this century saw are fully aware of how sprawl, and blind obeisance 60 percent population growth in America’s exurbs. As they added to the car culture that feeds it, negatively affect 10 million people to their numbers, the number of road miles driven their communities. At last count, more than 1,000 by Americans increased by nearly 200 billion. Even putting aside the mayors had signed their names to the U.S. Conference amount of atmospheric CO2 that all those extra miles represent, you’d think Kotkin would see how giving people mass-transit options promises of Mayors Climate Protection Agreement, formalizing to improve everyone’s commute—drivers included. their commitment to meet (or even exceed) standards In the century since they first appeared on our physical and cultural put forth by the Kyoto Protocol. The wording of the horizon, the suburbs have earned the right to consider themselves 2005 declaration is unambiguous: to take steps that every bit as American as our gleaming cities and rolling farmlands. There’s no stealth plan to “abolish” them. There is, instead, a perfectly would “reduce sprawl, preserve open space, and cretransparent plan to include them in the list of communities that must ate compact, walkable urban communities” and to be brought into the sustainability fold if we’re ever to address climate promote measures that would reduce car dependence: change effectively, protect wildlife habitat, and ensure that we don’t public transit, carpool incentive programs, and bicycle pollute or deplete our resources to the point of no return. Smart growth is great for cities—but it’s great for suburbs too. People who love them trails. Tellingly, the majority of signatories aren’t mayshould understand that any concerted effort to make them cleaner, ors of major urban centers, but of inner- and outer-ring prettier, safer, and less congested is a conspiracy worth joining.
Carbon-cutting Ceremony
suburbs. Visit usmayors.org/climateprotection to see if your mayor is on the list.
Jeff Turrentine is OnEarth’s articles editor. His hometown of Richardson, Texas, inspired the suburb depicted in the TV show King of the Hill.
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Frack Attack Natural gas drilling has scarred Pennsylvania’s pastoral landscape, divided communities and neighbors, and raised serious questions about public health images from the marcellus shale documentary project
t e x t by e l i z a b e t h r oy t e
Photograph by Martha Rial: Drill rigs and access roads carve great gashes in Pennsylvania’s pristine Tiadaghton State Forest.
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Photograph by Noah Addis: A Rex Energy gas-drilling rig lights up the night sky over Connoquenessing Township, Pennsylvania. The defining natural feature of northern Pennsylvania
is its woodlands, which make up one of the largest expanses of publicly accessible forest remaining in the eastern United States. Though decimated by logging in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this region has been recovering for nearly 100 years, and now attracts hundreds of thousands of hunters and trout fishers, hikers and canoers, bird-watchers, campers, skiers, and stargazers. (The so-called Pennsylvania Wilds are renowned for their exceptionally dark skies.) But these plateaus of hardwoods and conifers, whose biological diversity and ecological integrity send scientists into reveries, are coming under increasing pressure from the rapidly expanding energy industry. Most of Pennsylvania lies atop the gas-rich Marcellus Shale, where industry may develop as many as 60,000 wells over the next two decades—two-thirds of them within forest areas. The opening photograph by Martha Rial, taken over Tiadaghton State Forest in Lycoming County, hints at what’s at stake. The Marcellus Shale Documentary Project (the-msdp.us) is a nearly yearlong reconnaissance by six veteran photographers of the impact of shale gas in Pennsylvania. Taken together, the work depicts both winners and losers, the good and the bad, the awesome and the appalling. At times it’s difficult to say which is which: the issues are that complicated, the social and economic terrain ever shifting, and the dividing lines surprisingly fluid. By any measure, extracting natural gas from deep shale formations is an ugly process. Three-and-a-half-acre drill pads are scraped from the earth, then connected with roads, pipelines, and million-gallon ponds 3 0 onearth
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that hold fresh and contaminated water. Clearings are crammed with condensate tanks, separators, compressors, generators, chemicalfilled storage containers the size of freight cars, office trailers, and Porta-Potties. Drill rigs, like the one pictured above, project like rocket gantries from the rolling terrain. What happens underground is no less violent for going unobserved. After reaching the shale formation, in places more than a mile deep, operators turn their drill bits 90 degrees and proceed for another thousand feet or more. They blast small holes in the lateral borehole, then inject millions of gallons of highly pressurized water laced with chemicals and sand. The shale fractures, releasing pockets of natural gas along with water now contaminated with volatile organic compounds, radioactive materials, and heavy metals. (Many of these chemicals are linked with cancer, genetic mutations, and endocrine disruption.) The development of a drilling site involves roughly 1,000 vehicle trips back and forth each day, generating plumes of dust and diesel exhaust and straining local roadways. Engines rev, steel clanks, trucks beep, and the earth shakes as pipes are pounded into wells. At night, methane flares lend forests and cornfields a Hadean glow. During drilling and fracking, high-intensity lights shine around the clock. Noxious fumes from vehicles, tanks, flares, and wellheads drift on the wind. Nobody likes these intrusions, but industry reminds us that most of the assaults are temporary: drilling a single well can take months, but fracking rarely lasts longer than a few days. Still, opponents say, degradation of groundwater and soil (to say nothing of forest fragmentation and increased runoff of pollutants into streams) will last far longer. Then
Photograph by Brian Cohen: Since Janet McIntyre’s well water went bad, she has suffered from rashes, nosebleeds, and other ailments. there are the social impacts: depressed home and business values, these might interact with existing compounds in the environment or increased traffic and crime (as transient workers move in), rental units whether they move into plants and animals consumed by humans. The priced beyond the reach of non-gas-field workers, and fractured relations Environmental Protection Agency is currently conducting a four-year with neighbors, especially when drilling rigs rise just over the property study of fracking’s impact on drinking water, but the results aren’t due until 2014 and are not expected to define the probability of water line of a homeowner who will receive no financial benefit. On the flip side, energy booms have also boosted local economies, contamination. Compared with mountaintop removal or strip mining for coal, the manufacturing, and tax revenues. Oil and gas royalties have allowed livestock owners to expand herds, parents to send children to college, footprint of shale-gas extraction is admittedly small. Drilling rigs eventuand debtors to pay off loans. And let us not forget that natural gas is ally come down (though the heavy equipment may return to re-fracture abundant, cheap (for the moment), and domestically sourced. Burn- existing wells numerous times over several decades), well pads shrink, ing it generates fewer greenhouse gases than does burning coal, but and wastewater impoundments are filled in after wells quit producing. producing it—a process during which up to 9 percent of total gas output Still, these operations’ social and environmental effects ripple widely, may be lost through venting and leaks—may negate those advantages. both because the practice continues to grow (and will grow even faster in Perhaps the most worrisome aspect of drilling and fracking opera- the Marcellus if Governor Andrew Cuomo lifts New York State’s current tions is their long time line of uncertainty. No one knows for sure if fracking moratorium) and because every additional drill site requires shale-gas extraction, even when performed to the letter of existing ever more associated infrastructure: pipelines, access roads, processing law, harms human health. Anecdotes of illness and death and reports plants, substations, compressor stations, and staging areas. Already, of contaminated air, water, and soil abound. Janet McIntyre, pictured gas companies have leased about seven million acres of Pennsylvania’s public and private property—a quarter of the state’s above in her living room in Butler County, claims For expanded coverage of the landmass, including 385,400 acres of state forest land. that nearby drilling contaminated her tap water. Marcellus Shale Documentary Project, As energy extraction industrializes the counShe now uses bottled water for drinking, cooking, visit onearth.org/13spr/frackpix tryside, it’s exactly these forest refuges that gas and bathing. But proving cause and effect, especially when energy companies aren’t required to disclose all the chemicals field residents will turn to for solace. How disappointing, then, to discover—or just to learn, for those who take comfort simply in the they use or discharge, is extremely difficult. Unfortunately, the federal government hasn’t funded any long-term knowledge of wild places—that these dense and contiguous forests, studies of the transport and fate of fracking chemicals, let alone how so recently recovered, have quite recently been rebroken. spring 2013
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The desolate stretch of territory
alongside the South Branch of the Chicago River is littered with the shed husks of the city’s industrial past. Along overgrown banks, the rusting ribs of derelict warehouses poke out beneath crumbling storage silos. Just before South Ashland Avenue cuts across the river, there is a small spit of land where the South Branch splits—a couple of acres at most. Canal Origins Park is choked with weeds and windblown trash. Its concrete path leading to the river is lined with historical signs, now sun-bleached and obscured by a palimpsest of graffiti tags. A line of electrical pylons marches along the riverbank toward the hazy skyline of downtown, four miles distant. Locals gather at a railing, fishing in the brown water. One angler, a retired limo driver originally from Michoacán, Mexico, chomps a cigar
by MATTHEW POWER vividly described it, the creek was so clogged with grease and offal that people would mistake it for solid ground and fall in. Sometimes the surface would catch fire. Bubbles of methane would periodically rise up from the depths and burst, giving it its nickname, Bubbly Creek. A shout goes up at the rail as a second fisherman struggles with his bent-double rod. (“Might’ve got one!” he yells out to his friends, before adding the requisite punch line: “But it’s got three eyes!”) When he finally hauls his catch onto the bank, it is revealed to be not a fish at all, but rather a large (and angry) redeared slider turtle. A group gathers around as he frantically tries to remove the hook without losing a finger to the turtle’s snapping beak. Eventually the hook is freed, and everyone steps back as the dripping creature scuttles to the edge and launches itself over, splashing down
cry us a river in 1900, Chicagoans remade their city’s
namesake river. Then they let it go to hell. Now the question looms: can they save the waterway that made Chicago great? beneath his handlebar mustache and surveys the scene. I ask him if he ever eats fish from the river, and he just laughs. He’s a regular here, he tells me, but returned to the spot only a few days ago after having stayed away for weeks. “The day after it rained, there was so much dead fish floating around,” he says, gesturing toward the river with his cigar. “Hundreds of ’em.” Chicago’s municipal sewer system, overwhelmed by the heavy rainstorm, had overflowed again. He points to the concrete drainpipes that had disgorged tens of thousands of gallons of untreated waste and pollutants into the river. “They tested the water, said it was safe,” he says. “Maybe it was. I left, and I didn’t come back. It was horrible—the smell.” It’s been a troubled stretch of water for a long time. Made infamous in Upton Sinclair’s 1906 novel, The Jungle, the south fork of the South Branch served as the gutter for the vast Union Stock Yards, at one time the world’s largest meat producer, where several hundred million head of livestock were processed in the century after the Civil War. As Sinclair
and vanishing beneath the murky water. The turtle is a strange visitor in such a profoundly altered landscape, one where the natural world seems buried beneath a sedimentary burden of human detritus. But as unloved and forgotten as this little river junction appears, it has been as central to Chicago’s history as the skyscrapers piled up theatrically in the distance. It’s hard to ascribe majesty to such a dirty, ruin-crowded waterway, a rill so narrow it can be easily spanned by a well-thrown baseball. But it would be even harder to overstate this river’s importance to both the past and future of its city. Chicago—and America along with it—grew up around this river. A burgeoning nation’s commerce, sweeping migrations of humanity, colossal feats of engineering and architecture: all combined on either side of its banks to form the “stormy, husky, brawling, City of the showcase waterway Big Shoulders” that Carl The Chicago River winds Sandburg invoked in his through the city, making it great poem “Chicago.” an attraction for sightseers More than a century ago and an inescapable aspect in this exact spot, human of daily life for residents.
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ingenuity shaped nature to its will, smashing through the earthen barrier that separated the Mississippi River drainage area from the vast freshwater reservoir of the Great Lakes, stitching together the commercial energies and distinct ecosystems of the North American continent. The consequences of that decision are still playing out today in a metropolis where more than seven million people draw their drinking water from Lake Michigan—and where those same people pump their sewage back into the river. Myriad threats, from water pollution to flooding and invasive species, have made the question of what to do about the Chicago River one of the most important questions facing the city. And simply by asking it, Chicagoans are acknowledging a basic existential struggle. That struggle is between two competing visions. One is remedial and pragmatic, the province of engineers and bureaucrats. In their eyes, the river can and should be cleaned up only to the point where it can operate as a safe, functional waterway that exists to meet the demands placed on it by commerce, flood control, and the dispersal of wastewater. In the alternate vision, however, the river meets all of these demands—and more. Its proponents seek nothing less than to turn the Chicago River into a civic treasure, its newly cleaned banks lined with parks and homes and restored ecosystems, its very presence a clear and shimmering symbol of a great city built on making, trading, connecting: a symbol of American history’s inexorable flow toward progress. And in the bargain, they seek to make the river a living— and flourishing—example of environmental innovation and ecological stewardship, one that generations of Chicagoans will cherish.
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The landscape of present-day Chicago was formed
by the retreat of the Wisconsin glacier some 14,000 years ago, which resulted in a flat and marshy plain at the southern end of the enormous Great Lakes basin. The area was settled by Algonquian tribes, who called
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the slow and sinuous creek flowing into Lake Michigan shikaakwa, after the wild leeks that grew on its banks. When the French explorers Marquette and Jolliet canoed up the Mississippi and Illinois rivers in 1673, native guides showed them a portage—a few miles of swampy land that required the dragging of boats across a mud flat—linking the Great Lakes via the Chicago River to the Mississippi River system beyond. And so did a leech-infested marsh become one of the most strategic transit points in all of North America: a key to the continent. From this stroke of great geographical good fortune, Chicago evolved as a center of commerce and a key transportation hub, Sandburg’s “Player with Railroads and the Nation’s Freight Handler.” In 1848 a canal was dug to formalize the connection between the Chicago River and the lake, and railroads started pinwheeling out from the young city’s center. By the turn of the century, Chicago had grown an astonishing fiftyfold, to 1.7 million people, making it the fifth-largest city in the world. Its breakneck population growth put enormous strain on the river that cut through the city’s center and emptied into the lake, the source of its drinking water. The river flooded frequently and had become hideously polluted: outbreaks of dysentery, typhoid, and cholera throughout the nineteenth century led to fears of a city-destroying epidemic. The water had to be managed in some way. A municipal agency called the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District (MWRD) had been formed in 1889 to address wastewater and flooding issues for the rapidly expanding city. The idea seized upon by the political bosses was devilishly simple: reverse the Chicago River. By digging a long canal to connect it to the neighboring Des Plaines River, the MWRD could divert drinking it all in the flow and effectively flush the city’s waste The Jardine Water downstream—and ultimately into the Mis- Purification Plant, the sissippi—thus protecting Chicago’s drinking world’s largest, sugsupply, controlling flooding, and opening up a gests the magnitude much faster transportation route. Their solu- of Chicago’s needs.
tion, the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, was 160 feet wide, 9 feet deep, and 30 miles long, much of it carved through solid limestone. At the time of its completion, in 1900, it was hailed as a visionary feat of engineering, one that would wash Chicago’s troubles away and bear the city into a healthy and prosperous new future.
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illustration by bruce morser
One of the chief logistical hurdles Chicago has
faced is how to deal with its wastewater from sewage, storms, and flooding. Because of the city’s marshy location, flooding was a problem from its inception; in 1855 the city council ordered that downtown Chicago be elevated to accommodate a new drainage system. Armies of men working in tandem literally jacked up buildings, streets, and sidewalks by as much as 14 feet. But the city’s water problems have persisted to the present day. In July 2011, a single storm dropped nearly seven inches of rain overnight; thousands of basements were flooded, and municipal sewers containing both storm runoff and raw sewage overflowed into the Chicago River. To prevent the river from leaping its banks, the locks into Lake Michigan were opened, and millions of gallons of sewage flowed out into the lake. Such floods and sewer overflows have become increasingly common, with untreated human waste gushing into the river after nearly every heavy rain. To deal with the problem, the MWRD in 1972 launched one of the largest civil engineering projects in history. It was officially known as the Tunnel and Reservoir Plan (TARP), but was popularly known as the Deep Tunnel, a massive system which, its champions claimed, would be able to absorb runoff from even the most severe storms. More than a hundred miles of tunnels were dug through layers of bedrock, some as deep as 300 feet belowground, creating a subterranean complex with the capacity to store more than two billion gallons of wastewater. New reservoirs, the other half of the plan, would be able to hold billions more. Forty-one years and several billions of dollars later, completion of the Deep Tunnel is currently slated for 2029. To get a sense of what the city has to deal with, I drive out to the Mainstream Pumping Station, alongside the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, 15 miles west of downtown. Passing through the enormous circular gate at the facility’s entrance gives me a sense of the Deep Tunnel’s scale: at 32 feet in diameter, it’s the same size as some of the underground pipes that carry Chicago’s waste here. This is one of three such stations in a system that serves more than 10 million people, the vast majority of whom are unaware of its existence. With Henry Marks, a cheerful, bearded engineer who has worked for the MWRD for 27 years, I ride an elevator 30 stories down into the earth, eventually stepping out into a brightly lit chamber as large as two indoor basketball courts. Pumps whir and hum as they push Chicago’s sewage from tunnels back to the surface, where it will be treated. A giant steel screen in the pumping system catches the larger hunks of urban detritus that might jam or damage the pumps. (Marks has plenty of stories about all kinds of oddities that have been stopped by the screen: car hoods, railroad ties, bowling balls, even snowblowers.) The pressures, both literal and figurative, are enormous. If one of these pumps were to blow, the entire station would fill up to ground level with raw sewage. The Deep Tunnel must be constantly monitored; it must also be emptied out as much as possible before intense rains to free up space. The entire
from nrdc changing course
Karen Hobbs Senior policy analyst in NRDC’s water program, based in Chicago, focusing on water efficiency policy in the Great Lakes basin Why would the introduction of Asian carp into the Great Lakes be so disastrous? Asian carp—specifically the silver and bighead carp—could destroy the ecosystem by, quite literally, devouring a great deal of it. These carp are filter feeders, meaning they don’t seek their prey but rather open their mouths and simply take in whatever passes by. They can even be dangerous to humans. Silver carp are referred to as “flying carp” because they jump from the water when startled; given that they can weigh up to 40 pounds, they’re capable of hurting people. But perhaps the saddest thing about letting Asian carp establish themselves in the Great Lakes is that it would signal the complete failure—at all levels of government—to address a major crisis, even with plenty of advance warning. What are some of the benefits that would stem from the erection of a physical barrier in the Chicago River, disconnecting—for the first time in a century—the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River? First and foremost, restoring a physical divide would permanently close the invasive species superhighway between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi River. But beyond that, it would show that the Chicago region might finally be ready to move from its nineteenth-century wastewater and stormwater systems toward more progressive solutions, such as green infrastructure. Trees, rain gardens, and green roofs can prolong the life of our existing systems by improving their resilience; trees, for example, capture rainwater with their leaf canopies, preventing it from entering the sewer system in the first place. What role is climate change playing in Chicago’s flooding and wastewater troubles? In Chicago, we’re seeing how unusual precipitation patterns caused by climate change—too little rainfall in some years, too much rainfall in others—are leading to some real problems. As little as 0.67 inches of rain can lead to a combined sewer overflow, releasing sewage into the river and the lake. Heavy rainfalls have become more common. But at the same time, the kind of severe drought that has also become more common in our era of climate change poses problems of its own. Lake Michigan is at historically low levels right now; were they to drop further, the locks on the river might have to be closed to keep the river from reversing its flow on its own and sending tons of raw sewage into the lake, the source of Chicago’s drinking water.
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system can process 2.6 billion gallons a day— Wastewater is treated although when TARP is eventually completed, its at the Stickney Water capacity will be 17.5 billion gallons. I ask Marks if this increase in capacity will be enough to elimiReclamation Plant nate regular discharges into the river. “We hope!” before flowing out to the Mississippi River. he says, chuckling sheepishly. From Mainstream the city’s sewage is pumped to the Stickney Water Reclamation Plant, six miles away. Stickney is the largest wastewater treatment facility in the world; it sprawls across 414 acres and processes 750 million gallons of waste a day. Sewage is first pumped to scores of circular settling tanks, where solids are separated, and then to aerated digester troughs, where aerobic bacteria break down the waste. When I visit, there is no smell whatsoever in the air, just the bubbling sound of trillions of microbes, happily at their labor. After treatment, the water is pumped back into the canal and eventually flows down to the Gulf of Mexico. Unlike every other major city in the United States, however, Chicago doesn’t currently disinfect its wastewater, a process that typically involves UV radiation or chlorination. Levels of E. coli bacteria in non-disinfected wastewater sent from Stickney into the canal have registered 700 times above the legal limit for swimmable water. After years of legal pressure, the MWRD in 2010 finally agreed to begin disinfecting its wastewater by 2015. After leaving Stickney I drive past miles of sludge-drying lagoons to the site of the McCook reservoir: the long-delayed final stage of the Deep Tunnel project. From its edge I peer down at what appear to be, from a height of 300 feet, toy-size dump trucks loading quarried rock that will be sold as construction aggregate. When MWRD negotiated the digging of the reservoir, the excavation schedule was set according cleaning crew
to the market vicissitudes of the construction industry. TARP’s giant hole, it was agreed, would be dug only as fast as its excavated rock could be sold off. If market demand slowed (as it did, dramatically, during the latest recession), the pace of the digging would slow correspondingly. At current projections, the reservoir’s promised capacity of 10 billion gallons will not be reached until at least 2029. If that goal is met—which is anything but certain—it will have taken nearly 60 years to complete.
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Meanwhile, as this glacially paced drama unfolds, a
specter haunts the dreams of Chicago’s water managers in the form of a silvery, flashing mass of invasive Asian carp, swarming north along the Mississippi system toward the Great Lakes. Originally imported to the United States in the 1960s to eat the algae that were clogging commercial fish farms, the carp may have entered the Mississippi River system as early as the 1970s. The fish reproduce rapidly and are voracious eaters that can grow to be 110 pounds, outcompeting many native fish species. The sport and commercial fishing industry in the Great Lakes is worth an estimated $7 billion annually, making it one of the most valuable freshwater fisheries on earth. Were Asian carp to establish themselves in the lakes, the fish would be nearly impossible to eradicate and would likely lead to ecological and economic catastrophe. Since the Chicago Ship and Sanitary Canal is seen as the carp’s most likely route to the Great Lakes, it is, appropriately, where one of the most concerted governmental efforts to stem the carp’s advance is taking place. One approach that has received considerable support from scientists, environmental advocates, and lawmakers was laid out in a 2012
report by the Great Lakes Commission, an international agency formed by the U.S. states and Canadian provinces that border the lakes. Its report advocated the “hydrologic separation” of the Mississippi and Great Lakes ecosystems. It’s a wonky way of describing a dramatic step: restoring the physical barrier between the two ecosystems and, in the process, restoring the original flow of the Chicago River—away from the Mississippi watershed and back into Lake Michigan. Separation is a highly controversial proposition. It has been decried by Chicago’s politically connected shipping industry as a job killer. Others raise fears that without the canal as an outlet for Chicago’s stormwater, the city is but one good flood away from devastation. Mainly, however, opponents simply say that the costs would be prohibitive. But whatever the costs of physical separation, many think that it would be effective at keeping the carp out of Lake Michigan—far more effective than the series of electric barriers that the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers currently operates in the canal, which malfunction from time to time. “It’s a no-brainer that a physical barrier is going to be more effective than any other kind,” says David Lodge, director of the University of Notre Dame’s Environmental Change Initiative. “But that’s different from saying that’s what should be done.” Lodge sees his role as educating people about long-term risks and rewards, and then leaving the public and policy makers to decide. One of the difficulties he faces is getting all parties to think in terms of a longer time frame, rather than an immediate cost-benefit analysis. “What’s the likely future cost if we don’t do anything?” he asks. “What’s the cost of the status quo?”
A map by baker vail
A vast array of possibilities arises from that very
question. In decades of raging debates over the fate of the Chicago River, perhaps no organization has been more emblematic of the status quo, and the frustrations born of Chicago-style politics, than the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District. David St. Pierre, the MWRD’s executive director, has an unenviable job. It’s certainly not easy overseeing such a vast system, what with perpetually squeezed budgets and hell to pay whenever people’s basements flood or the city’s lakefront is shut down by a sewage outflow. The two most extreme rain events in the city’s history have occurred in the past five years. Meanwhile, as he ponders the ramifications of that particular fact, he has many different constituencies to satisfy: government, business, environmental advocates, and the general public. St. Pierre says he wants “to look at problems in a holistic sense,”
placing everyone’s competing needs on an equal footing. Toward this end, he’s more than willing to have an open dialogue about the most pressing issues facing the river—even the hugely complicated prospect of separation and reversal. The fact that he’s willing to talk about these ideas at all represents a significant step forward for the MWRD. The agency has long been seen as averse to any form of outside interference. (It resisted disinfection of its outgoing treated wastewater for decades, for example, with one member arguing that disinfecting water that reentered the river would only encourage people to swim, and lead to more drownings.) All the same, St. Pierre says he could support a separation scheme so long as it met or exceeded current water-quality levels and Completed in 1900, flood-control capacity. In perthe Chicago Sanitary son he comes across as both and Ship Canal redirected the flow of the Chicago open-minded and skeptical; he River away from Lake understands all the arguments Michigan and toward the Mississippi River. for separation and appreciates the alternatives the Great Lakes Commission and others have put forth. But when it comes to discussing their chances of success, he’s as blunt as an alderman up against the wall at a raucous town hall meeting. “All of them are cost-prohibitive,” he says. “Nobody has that kind of money right now.” The excuse that a crucial initiative may be worth doing—but that the money, alas, simply isn’t there—is as old as politics itself. But it forces one to ask questions along the lines of Lodge’s. Shouldn’t shortterm economic concerns be balanced against, say, compliance with the Clean Water Act? Against the need to do right by the future citizens of Chicago? The city’s water keepers have made it clear that they don’t like to be told what they can and can’t do. But there may be a more dispiriting explanation for their inertia. On some profound level, Chicago’s planners have always thought of the river, first and foremost, as a sewer. Any other value or imaginative possibilities it might hold have tended to come in a distant second. There are, however, promising signs that the agency’s ossified culture may be shifting. More than any of his predecessors, St. Pierre seems open to progressive ideas. It’s just that his job requires wrapping his mind around billion-gallon (and billion-dollar) units. He says, for example, that he’d like to see a workable plan for creating 2,000 gallons of green infrastructure storage for every home—an advance, he believes, that would be large and noteworthy enough to have a real impact and create a true sense of shared stakes and responsibility. Something like that, he believes, would force Chicagoans to identify the river’s sad state as “a community problem.” And people have to start thinking in those terms, he says, “if you’re going to change the culture.” spring 2013
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WAY, WAY DOWN The Mainstream Pumping Station captures wastewater whenever Chicago’s sewers overflow.
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As it happens, there are plenty of people within the
larger Chicago community who are already thinking in these terms. One group working to “change the culture” is Friends of the Chicago River, an advocacy organization founded in 1979. John Quail, its director of watershed planning, understands well the political challenges and bureaucratic inertia that have always stood in the way of real change. But, he tells me, in recent years Chicago’s mayors have come to realize that “the river is an asset for economic development and recreational development.” He has seen real progress, accompanied by some powerful visual symbols: an otter was spotted swimming in the main stem of the river not long ago, the first such sighting in generations. But, Quail says, “You’ve got to make the water improvements and the habitat improvements at the same time. Because if you’re releasing sewage into the river 200 times a year while you’re putting condos or restaurants on it, or having people paddle on it, that’s not a sustainable situation.” Perhaps the most high-profile local figure engaged in the task of reimagining the Chicago River is the architect Jeanne Gang. Gang is a MacArthur Fellow who has designed stunningly innovative buildings for cities all over the world. Her Aqua skyscraper, completed in 2010, rises 859 feet above Chicago, its wavelike facade a gorgeously undulating contrast to its modernist and art deco neighbors. I meet Gang one day at her office, where a team of architects bustles around us. She shows me her proposed redesign for Northerly Island, on Chicago’s lakefront: a park featuring a seamlessly integrated marina, amphitheater, and range of wildlife habitats from woodland to lagoon to reef, all built on the site of a former municipal airport. This blurring of the divisions between human uses and the forms and functions of the natural world is a signature of Gang’s design work, and has led to her ongoing creative engagement with the possibilities for redeeming the Chicago River. Intrigued by the ideas of hydrologic separation and flow reversal, Gang turned them into the basis of a classroom exercise for her students at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. She encouraged them to think broadly, to engage not just the physical challenges of the site but also the social, cultural, economic, and educational possibilities. One student’s project sought to incorporate the derelict Fisk coal plant into a barrier: wastewater from the canal would pass through a series of “vertical wetlands” within the soaring volume of the building’s huge turbine hall, which would be further repurposed into a public water-education center. Another student imagined a barrier that doubled as a pedestrian bridge connecting two neighborhoods, Pilsen and Bridgeport, separated by the canal. It would be yet another meaningful symbol: two historic Chicago communities being brought together at the same time that a natural division was being restored. A third proposal entailed building a network of neighborhood-scale wetlands on disused tracts across the city; together they would form a natural buffer, absorbing wastewater and runoff before they reached the river. It’s an example of green infrastructure on a scale both epic and intimate (and one that’s not so far off from what David St. Pierre has said he’d like to see). Still another student looked at ways of incorporating green technology into the riverfront’s many abandoned industrial spaces. “A power grid, a fish farm—new industry to replace the lost industry,” Gang says. Encroaching Asian carp, she adds, could even be harvested for processing into biofuel or fertilizer. I ask Gang if these aren’t just pipe dreams, impossible to get past Chicago’s political gatekeepers or a skeptical public. “Nothing gets
you more involved with politics than having your basement flood,” she says. The key, she believes, is to break what may seem like an impossibly large project into discrete, manageable efforts: “It’s not an easy time to get anything to happen. But you can incentivize things to happen on a more dispersed, networked scale—things like building green infrastructure.” It occurs to me that what she’s describing is a kind of utopian incrementalism: a poetic inversion of the frustrating slowness the city brings to its own progress on huge projects like TARP. The question must be asked: Why shouldn’t Chicago reimagine itself in a big way? After all, it has done so several times. When it was literally elevated to a higher grade, back in the 1850s. After the great fire of 1871, when it arose, phoenix-like, to become the first modern city, erecting the first skyscraper in 1885. And, of course, in 1900, when it reversed the flow of the Chicago River. Now, it would seem, is the time to conjure those same spirits of optimism and daring and to put all of How is climate change transforming Chicago’s Big Shoulders—and big the Chicago River? Get the latest at minds—to work once more. It begins onearth.org/chicagoriver with Chicagoans’ deciding what it is they really want, and having the audacity to say that they deserve it. And then, says Gang, “you just work backward. It’s step by step.”
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On a perfect, blue-sky summer morning, I take the El
to the North/Clybourn stop and walk to the boat launch by Goose Island. I rent a kayak, strap on a life jacket, and slip the boat into the water. Mallards bob along the shoreline, and a panorama of the city spools out before me. Every hundred yards or so, a concrete sewer pipe pokes out into the river like the entrance to a sea cave. Newly built condominiums and retrofitted warehouse buildings line the banks in many places. The river, long ignored (except when it’s dyed green on St. Patrick’s Day), has recently become something of a magnet for development—recognized finally for its aesthetic value, at least: the view of it, from a high apartment window, is considered an amenity. Turning east into the main stem, I dodge ferry traffic as I paddle beneath a series of bridges. Tourists peer down at me. The scene is astonishingly beautiful. Many of the iconic works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century architecture rise above the river: the Wrigley Building, the Tribune Tower, the Sears tower. Even the Trump International Hotel has a glittering phallic majesty to it. Does it really require a crisis—floods, pollution, an invasion of carp— to make meaningful change happen? When he served as President Obama’s chief of staff, Chicago mayor Rahm Emmanuel was fond of instructing his staff to “never allow a crisis to go to waste.” One wonders if he’ll take his own advice when it comes to the Chicago River. In his iconic poem, Carl Sandburg spoke of a young city laughing “under the terrible burden of destiny.” That historical burden—that sense of a city grasping toward the limits of what is possible—still seems manifest. As I pass under Lake Shore Drive, there is only one lock separating me, and the Chicago River, from the deep blue, oceanic expanse of Lake Michigan. I spin around in the slow current and look back down the river as it slips through the monuments of human ingenuity. If all this was made, it occurs to me, it can be made right. Matthew Power is a contributing editor to Harper’s and writes frequently on environmental issues. spring 2013
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faraway places Eva Saulitis stands on Bishop’s Beach in Homer, on the tip of Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula.
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The Woman
story
Who
Loves
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left: photograph for onearth by chris mueller; right: tory kallman/national geographic society/corbis
by Ted Genoways
Scientist, poet, and cancer survivor Eva Saulitis says that orcas saved her life. If only she could return the favor.
he bad weather was my good fortune.
At the tail end of another summer on Prince William Sound, the whale biologist Eva Saulitis was fed up with high winds and rolling swells. Rather than endure one more night tucked into a bunk aboard the tiny research vessel Natoa with gales blowing at a steady 30 knots, she persuaded Craig Matkin—her partner “in research and in life”—to motor into the calmer waters of Resurrection Bay and tie up until morning in Seward, on the eastern side of Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula. This not only ensured that I could join them for the last day of her season at sea but also meant that I could tag along to a potluck dinner with the team of amateur whale researchers they have enlisted to form the North Gulf Oceanic Society. When I found the Natoa’s slip, Saulitis was in the galley putting the finishing touches on marinated steaks of silver salmon and a massive tossed salad. Saulitis is 50, but her Latvian cheekbones and tumbling blond curls
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somehow make her seem much younger. She wears a near-constant smile that conveys universal warmth but also some deep-seated concern verging on worry. Matkin, by contrast, is full of bluster and grumble, like a motor with water in the bilge, but in greeting me he quickly made clear how pleased he was that I’d taken an interest in Saulitis’s work. In all their years together, Matkin has always been the mouthpiece, the public face of their research, while Saulitis has hidden, contentedly it seems, in his shadow. But recent events, affecting both her personal life and debates about the future of Alaska’s ecosystems, have pushed Saulitis to become a more outspoken advocate for the killer whales she studies and loves. Most notably, she has just published a book aimed at a lay audience, titled Into Great Silence: A Memoir of Discovery and Loss Among Vanishing Orcas. It is a chronicle of her near quarter century of studying the AT1s, a unique group of killer whales with the relatively localized range of Prince William Sound, the Kenai Fjords, and the mouth of Resurrection Bay. The whales also serve as something of an emblem and cautionary tale for anyone interested in saving the disappearing species of America’s remaining wild places. The AT1s may well be in their final throes before extinction, but—caught up by environmental change too rapid for science to document, much less halt—they may be gone before they’re even officially recognized. Killer whales are currently considered a single species, but that classification is being rethought as scientists catalog more and more distinctions in body type, diet, behavior, and even genetics among different populations. The whales of the eastern North Pacific are generally divided into “residents” and “transients,” but those names, increasingly, are misnomers. The difference between the two groups is less about their range than their preferred food sources. Residents exclusively eat
There’s no denying this or it. The time for cleaning up Prince William Sound has
fixing
passed.
fish, while transients eat marine mammals. But the more scientists know, the more even those distinctions break down. “Offshore” killer whales, for example—a proposed third group—seem to eat mostly sharks. No group defies easy classification quite as stubbornly as the AT1s. They eat harbor seals and Dall’s porpoises, but their range is much smaller than that of any other group of transients. They don’t associate with other killer whales, even other seal eaters, and seem—as described by Lance Barrett-Lennard, another of Saulitis’s colleagues—to have a genetically distinct ancestry. They may be some remnant of a very old group of killer whales, perhaps an earlier form from across the Pacific that gave rise to the more localized and specialized groups we commonly see today. That might explain why their complex call structure—first studied and categorized by Saulitis—encompasses a greater range of sounds than the limited vocabularies of other transient populations. In simple terms, most killer whales speak variant dialects; the AT1s speak another language. That fact alone makes the AT1s fascinating, but the need to understand more about their unique behavior and communication has grown more pressing as their numbers have dwindled. When Saulitis began
this article was made possible by a generous grant from the vervane foundation 4 2 onearth
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studying them in the mid-1980s, there were only 22 individuals in the entire group—just enough genetic diversity to maintain the population. AT1 group of orcas, But then, in March 1989, the Exxon Valdez ran otherwise known as aground on Bligh Reef, spilling at least 11 milkiller whales, cavort in lion gallons of oil into Prince William Sound. Prince William Sound. Soon after, four AT1s were photographed swimming through the slick; three of them, along with six other members of the group, went missing soon after and were never seen again. Since then, others have died, their tissues carrying the telltale signs of high levels of toxic contaminants common in crude oil. If that weren’t enough, either because of these chemicals or simply because of the lack of sufficient genetic diversity, the remaining members have been left unable to reproduce. The two surviving females are approaching an age at which breeding would be impossible, even if conditions were right. All of which has pressed a hard reality upon Saulitis. “They are leaving the earth under my watch,” she writes in her book. “There will, perhaps in my lifetime, be a last one.” There’s no denying this or fixing it. The time for cleaning up Prince William Sound has passed. Saulitis is simply documenting the decline, gathering as much information as she can before the inevitable arrives. This difficult truth hung over all of our conversations, even the quiet potluck on our first night together. Saulitis and Matkin guided me through Seward to a gravel lot where boats stood dry-docked for the winter. At the back, tucked into a clutch of gnarly willows, was the Right Whale, a 48-foot research vessel built by the owners, Cy St-Amand and his wife, L. A. Holmes, who now rent it out, running charters for marine researchers like Saulitis and Matkin. The boat, propped in a rutted, muddy berth, seemed both whimsical and imposing in the half-light. Inside the cramped cabin, dinner was an intricate dance: St-Amand mixed stiff rum and Cokes, made with the kind of cheap spiced rum that comes in plastic bottles (no glass on deck), while Saulitis moved the Coho steaks in and out of the oven. Holmes and Dan Olsen, who works as a seasonal captain and naturalist for Kenai Fjords Tours in Seward, swapped stories of recent sightings, recounting tales of close encounters and pieced-together narratives of what could be heard when they dropped hydrophones and listened to the whales call. After dinner, St-Amand leveled his gaze toward me. “So, why the AT1s?” he asked. Why would someone like me care about them? Was it just because we could quantify how small their numbers have become? All of the whales—all of the wildlife of Alaska— were devastated long ago. “When people say our other whales are doing well,” he said, “that means they’re holding to within 1 percent of where they were last year. That doesn’t mean they’re doing well historically. We’re looking at the trash that was left over.” He smiled from under his broom of a mustache. “So if you see 150 whales tomorrow, you’re seeing the remains.” Matkin howled at the number, warning me not to get my hopes up, but Saulitis sat silently, almost motionless. Later, after we’d said our goodbyes and made our way back toward the center of Seward, she confessed that she had been trying to keep from crying. “I had never heard them talk about their connection to the AT1s,” she said. “How we’re twined with their story was right in the room. We’re so fated, and so fatefully connected to these animals.” She paused a beat, in thought. “How?” one last leap
left: cathy hart/alaska stock; illustration by bruce morser
Two survivors from the
from nrdc troubled waters
Michael Jasny Senior policy analyst and director of NRDC’s marine mammal project
In the wake of the Exxon Valdez spill, most of the orcas in the AT1 group died. Now only seven remain. Are any other marine mammals on the planet as endangered as these? Quite a few are in really desperate straits: vaquitas in the Gulf of California; river dolphins in China, India, and Southeast Asia; and right whales in the North Pacific, which Russian whaling all but obliterated in the mid-twentieth century. With time, I’m afraid we’ll find more and more marine mammal populations living on the edge. I’m extremely concerned, for example, about bottlenose dolphins along the Gulf of Mexico shoreline, little communities of animals that have suffered massively from the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Every year, somewhere in the world, we seem to find another coastal population that is smaller, more localized, and more vulnerable than we had imagined. What can be done to bring populations like the AT1 back from the brink? Unfortunately, when a population diminishes to the size of the AT1s, recovery becomes very difficult. Low abundance tends to reduce the fitness of individual animals and undermine the resilience of populations; it has a force of its own that pulls toward extinction. To give endangered species a chance, we have to alleviate stressors—entanglement in fishing nets, toxic loading, habitat loss, and so on—that are working against their survival and recovery. Our wildlife agencies are required by law to adopt recovery plans to accomplish this. But in practice, many of the recommendations made in these plans go unfunded and unimplemented. Eva Saulitis is unusual in that she’s describing the plight of the AT1s both as a scientist and as a poet. Well, there is something about whales that inspires this. You don’t have to look farther than Moby-Dick to see the effects of a poet drawn to whale science. Whales for Melville are objects of the most exacting naturalism and, at the same time, the most extreme flights of Romantic imagination— which is part of what gives his book its power. You can read Saulitis as belonging to a similar tradition, trying to reconcile some very different ways of seeing whales. Of course she has more of a contemporary perspective on extinction. Melville, writing in an age before factory-ship hunting, mass pollution, and climate change, pronounced the whale “eternal.” Would that were so.
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S
aulitis came to killer whales by a circuitous
path. She tried to explain it as we loaded gear and prepared to head out of Resurrection Bay toward Fox Island, but she kept interrupting herself, rummaging through one plastic bin after another. The wind was still blowing hard, and Saulitis was preoccupied with the worry that I would become hopelessly seasick. So she dug around, producing herbal pills, some tea, a wristband for one arm, and, for the other, a shock watch—a battery-powered device that doles out low-level electrical charges every few seconds to dupe your inner ear into thinking you’re standing on shore. The hodgepodge of cures was part of her private stash. As Matkin backed the Natoa out and puttered past the breakwater toward the chop of the bay, Saulitis laughed at the ridiculousness of a marine biologist who suffers from seasickness. After all, it was whitecaps that had lured her away from her first love: music. She studied to become a concert oboist at Northwestern but experienced crippling stage fright. To overcome her fear, she spent countless hours whittling her reeds and playing in the university’s tiny practice rooms overlooking Lake Michigan. “You could see this wild water,” she told me. And one day she thought, I’ve got to get out of here. I have to be outside. She transferred to Syracuse in her native New York and enrolled in the College of Environmental Science and Forestry. With a degree in fish and wildlife biology in hand, Saulitis came to Alaska in 1986 and landed a job as a technician at a salmon hatchery on Esther Island in Prince William Sound. In December, her boyfriend persuaded her to get some of the scant winter sun by taking the hatchery skiff out to Wells Passage. On their way back, Saulitis saw a dark wave amid the rollers. She realized it was a black dorsal fin. They steered into the whale’s path in time to see her surface, then dive and disappear. All spring, Saulitis watched for killer whales along the shoreline near the hatchery and finally managed to snap a few photographs of their fins. She sent them to Matkin, whom she’d heard of through a mutual friend, along with a simple offer: “I’ll scrub your decks, cook, clean, whatever, for a chance to volunteer on your boat.” On the eve of her 24th birthday, the mail barge arrived with Matkin’s reply: as it happened, he needed an assistant that summer. It was aboard Matkin’s research vessel, Lucky Star, that Saulitis first encountered the AT1s and began using a hydrophone to make recordings of their unique calls. Now, as we approached Fox Island, she unwound the snaking black coil and dropped the waterproof microphone over the side of the Natoa with an unceremonious plop. The receiver hissed, like an old snowy picture tube, and beeped periodically to indicate that the system was still connected, but the waters around the island were silent that day. Saulitis munched on homemade granola bars (from a tub labeled “Bear Shit”) as she remembered the first time she picked up the calls of AT1s over the hydrophone. She had heard killer whales before, but this was “something other.” 4 4 onearth
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Communicating across great distances, they would caterwaul in long, siren-like cries, turned up at the end as if they were questions. “This was a voice at once strident and mournful,” she writes in her memoir, “a strange hybrid instrument, part trumpet, part oboe, part elephant, part foghorn. And loud.” But when the lone scouts were joined by more members of their group, the calls changed to “upswept squawks punctuated by silence; bangs and cracks, like axe blows against one-by planks, some we could attribute to fluke slaps, and some not. Now and then a
“nothing could be darker” Four orcas from the AT1 group swim right through the oil slick from the Exxon Valdez. After the 1989 disaster, the tanker was banned from ever again entering Prince William Sound.
syncopated blast of echolocation, like automatic gunfire.” Saulitis eventually spent 230 hours making more than 6,000 recordings of the 22 AT1s then active in Prince William Sound. She identified 14 discrete call types and correlated them to specific behaviors—loud chattering when the whales were socializing; soft, low-frequency bleats while hunting. The work would become the basis of her master’s thesis at the University of Alaska Fairbanks—and would yield a number of important discoveries. “Most significant, and most worrying,” she wrote, the AT1s “shared no calls with other populations, suggesting genetic isolation.” No sooner had Saulitis come to this conclusion—since supported by DNA research—than the Valdez struck Bligh Reef. Saulitis freely admits that she returns compulsively to the hours before the spill, turning it over in her mind. The night before, when the supertanker was still in the terminal, filled with oil, the Cordova marine biologist and activist Riki Ott addressed the mayor’s oil action committee in Valdez, warning of a spill she called “the Big One.” What if someone had thought to inspect the Valdez that night? Might he have found “the tanker’s drunken skipper,” as Saulitis calls him, in the midst of his bender or already passed out in his bunk? Might he have discovered that the tanker’s radar had been broken and switched off for more than a year—too costly, in Exxon’s opinion, to repair? “Something in me,” Saulitis writes, “obsessively rewinds the tape, scrutinizes each
left: los angeles times; map by joe lemonnier
increment, trying to find the one word or gesture that would have turned the tanker away from the reef—a few degrees north, a few moments sooner—allowing us all to awaken to ordinary rhythms of water on a blessedly ordinary day.” Instead, researchers at the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of Alaska Fairbanks called together their graduate students for a meeting. Before speaking, they showed slides of the damage. One photo showed the black hull of the scuttled supertanker, its name clearly painted in white block letters. “Nothing could be darker than that hull, I thought,” Saulitis writes. “But then I saw that something was darker. Black against black, four dorsal fins, four orcas.” Soon, the 22 whales she knew well enough to recognize on sight had been reduced to half their number—and, in the years after, dwindled to just seven individuals that Saulitis can now tick off by their nicknames: Chenega, Iktua, Egagutak, Mike, Marie, Ewan, Paddy. In a full day on the water together we saw a humpback whale (announced as a “wide guy” by a cruise operator across the marine band radio) and an enormous group of Steller’s sea lions flopping off rock outcroppings into the waves. But hours of scanning the shoreline for blows puffing up from the breakers, of cutting the motor at favored anchorages to drop the hydrophone and listen, yielded nothing. And so, when the sun finally began sinking low and the air again turned cold and gusty, Matkin turned back toward the harbor. On the bridge above the wheelhouse, Saulitis opened the big binder of photographs they use in the field to confirm sightings and identify specific individuals. She flipped to the pages with the AT1s and pointed to the dorsal of one of the seven, a young male nicknamed Egagutak, which they hadn’t seen in more than a year. “He’s the one roamer that’s left,” she said, “but you never see him anymore. I was just thinking yesterday . . . God, what if he just decided to mix with some other whales?” Later, back on shore, Saulitis returned to that fantasy, confessing that it grew from her long-held and festering anguish over the Valdez spill. Egagutak was the one AT1 photographed swimming through the oil slick that had managed to survive. The other three males in the photograph had vanished, leaving Egagutak to hunt on his own forever after. Rather than believe that he, too, was now gone, Saulitis preferred to imagine that he had found companions, maybe even a mate. “It’s just one of those spontaneous graspings after some hope,” she conceded. “I just want to know he’s out there somewhere.” It was this very impulse that eventually pushed Saulitis away from “the objective language and rigid methodology of science.” She longed
for a way of tackling environmental issues that admitted to a personal stake, an idiom that spoke with greater ardor and greater awe. Above all, she wanted to concentrate on the possible, not simply record the inevitable. In short, she needed to “develop another language with which to address the natural world.” In the 1990s she started writing poetry, and instead of entering a Ph.D. program in biology, she entered the MFA program in creative nonfiction in Fairbanks. In the 15 years since, she has continued to publish scientific papers, but the bulk of her writing has been gathered into books of poems and essays. It’s a decision that has brought her both critical acclaim and personal happiness—and, along the way, her professional partnership with Matkin crossed over from the realm of science to become an enduring romance. Despite her success as a writer and the domestic contentment she has found, Saulitis spent many years avoiding writing directly about the Valdez spill and the fate of the AT1s. That changed when she was suddenly confronted by the prospect of her own death.
I
n late March 2010,
while visiting her sister on Cape Cod, Saulitis was diagnosed with breast cancer. Rather than returning home to Alaska, she went directly into treatment. Once a week, her sister would drive her into Boston, where Saulitis would be hooked up to an IV that pumped a cocktail of chemo drugs into a vein on her right hand. Afterward her sister would drive her back to her third-floor bedroom on Cape Cod. She maintained a regimen of anti-nausea meds choked down with spoonfuls of applesauce, but her queasy stomach never seemed to quiet. Worse still, her white blood cell counts would yo-yo wildly after each treatment. Hardest of all, Saulitis says, the ravaging of her body by chemotherapy seemed mirrored by the black, cancerous mass spreading across the Gulf of Mexico. Every day for weeks, as she struggled through treatment, the Deepwater Horizon spill dominated the news, “creating inside me,” she wrote in her online cancer journal, “an upwelling: memories of oil and whales and carcasses and boats and haggard human faces.” As summer approached, Matkin prepared to go out on Prince William Sound without Saulitis for the first time in 24 years. Cy St-Amand filled in for her at the wheel, and Saulitis began to wonder if she would live to see the AT1s vanish after all. In August, her white cell count plummeted so precipitously that she needed an emergency blood transfusion. The cancer, she thought, might carry her away. To ease the side effects of chemotherapy and level out her white blood cell counts, Saulitis was encouraged to try visualization spring 2013
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keeping count Aboard the research vessel Natoa, Saulitis and her partner, Craig Matkin, log photographs of the dorsal fin of each orca they spot.
Every morning thereafter, still in bed, Saulitis logged on to the satellite-tracking site. She waited as a digitized map of Prince William Sound stitched itself across the screen, then watched the points and lines chart the path of Chenega’s nocturnal wanderings. But it was just cold data. “There. Off Point Helen,” Saulitis wrote. “I clicked on the biggest dot, the most recent satellite hit: 4:30 a.m., heading south. The dots told me only that much.” In a flash, Saulitis saw what she needed to do. For the rest of that hot August and into the fall, she propped herself up in bed (or at a desk when she could muster the strength) and wrote out the whales’ stories—what she knew of their habits and demeanor, her encounters with them—first for Chenega, then for the other AT1s. Imagining herself there, Saulitis could return to the days before the Valdez spill and finally begin to confront the awful years after. She says now that she drew strength from the knowledge that the AT1s were still out there. By being away from Prince William Sound for a summer, she could start to believe that—like Egagutak—she could survive on her own. “Whatever he’s doing, he’s being a killer whale, he’s being an AT1,” she says. She could also emerge from Matkin’s shadow and write about the AT1s—and their fate—in her own way, in the language of poetry rather than science. That simple realization was a turning point. Now cancer-free for two years and with a positive prognosis, she must once again face the inevitability of observing their disappearance. “They saved me,” Saulitis insists, “though I can’t save them.”
photograph for onearth by chris mueller
therapy. Each time the nurse inserted the needle into her hand, Saulitis pictured the same scene: I’m in the little red kayak paddling toward Zaikof Bay, where a group of orcas slowly mills. They’re AT1s, Chenega, Iktua, and Mike, and I paddle among them until I’m parallel to Chenega’s flank, and I place the flat of my hand against the flat of her dorsal fin. She holds herself still in the water beside my kayak. Every once in a while she lifts her head slightly and blows, and I hear it, and feel the cool mist of her breath on my face. Through my hand, I feel her power, her myoglobin, and its energy travels up my arm, into my body. Soon after she began visualization therapy, Saulitis received a call from Matkin via satellite phone with some unexpected news. That August evening, after an icy day in lashing winds futilely trying to tag a group of AT1s, he and St-Amand had given up and headed toward a favored anchorage on Knight Island. Suddenly, Chenega appeared off the Natoa’s bow. Chenega is usually very shy, Saulitis explained—so nervous around boats that she bangs her fluke on the surface of the water to show her displeasure. But that day, she pulled up alongside the Natoa, porpoising out of the water to keep up. St-Amand stomped on the cabin roof to alert Matkin—and Matkin tagged her, easily, with one shot. Now Matkin asked Saulitis to open her laptop and log on to the ARGOS satellite-tracking website. He wanted to know: was the tag putting out a signal? “It was,” Saulitis wrote in her journal. “I could see Chenega’s path as she zigzagged around Knight Island Passage, and I joked that she’d intentionally allowed him to tag her, so I could follow her movements from thousands of miles away, on another ocean’s coast, in the third-floor room at my sister’s house.”
O
ur unsuccessful day on Resurrection Bay
marked the end of the research season, so Saulitis and Matkin packed up and headed back to Homer. Saulitis was eager to return to her garden, set back in the trees amid tall stands of fireweed and peekaboo views of Kachemak Bay. Alaskans often joke that there are only two seasons there: winter and preparing for winter. With that transition hard upon her, Saulitis was hurrying through final preparations before the cold set in; already stiff winds were blowing in from the Gulf of Alaska, sending the mercury plummeting and filling the sky over Homer with heavy flurries. I drove down to the office of the North Gulf Oceanic Society, just a stone’s throw from the water. Saulitis showed up, a little late and a little frazzled, a forced smile on her face. Then she bit her lower lip and tears ran down her cheeks. All morning, she had been chewing over old memories of the Valdez spill. “I think about the individual stories of anguish, of all those people,” she said. She caught her breath. “And then some f***ing million-dollar ad campaign, some whitewashing oil company can just wipe it all away. That story is gone. No, the story out there is that this went well. The Exxon Valdez—what a stellar example of how the oil industry can respond.” Her voice surged with anger, but her face was tight with anguish, not rage. She laid out the office copy of Killer Whales of Southern Alaska, a volume she and Matkin assembled with three other researchers in 1999. The book was intended as a version of the field guide they keep on the Natoa, a set of dorsal fin photos grouped by locality and pod with thumbnail histories for each of the individual whales. The spread for the AT1s was covered with Post-its and Saulitis’s handwritten notes about each of the six subgroups that had existed when she first started her work. Two Post-its recorded those killed in the immediate aftermath of the spill; another described how one family of whales had temporarily regrouped. But at the bottom was a circled note: “all dead.” Another subgroup was down to one individual; the other two had just three each, with truant Egagutak still listed among them. The devastation to this particular group was graphically displayed, but Saulitis was quick to recognize that there’s too little information about them, or about killer whales in general, for science to acknowledge the loss of this population as a true extinction. Even with genetically distinct markers, researchers insist that there just isn’t enough data to classify the AT1s as anything more than a “threatened population.” “I think they are at least a separate subspecies,” Saulitis said—but there’s too little agreement on the structure of reclassification to proceed. “We’re not even at that level. We’ve been able to separate them for management purposes, at least—to get scientists to recognize that there are these different stocks. The problem is that even if you were to call these separate species—let’s say Alaskan residents versus separate species of transients—there’s still a diversity, almost at the pod level within the subpopulation, that’s important for conservation. I mean, what is the conservation imperative? What does it mean to lose one pod? Does that matter, if they’re all just part of a larger species of killer whale?”
Later, back at home, sipping hot tea at her kitchen table overlooking the bay, Saulitis explained that such questions had driven her to divide her attentions between science and literature, to keep one foot in each world. Even if science doesn’t register the vanishing of the AT1 group as an extinction, Saulitis still does. She sees her project, now that she once again expects to outlive the whales, as one of witness and conduit between her two worlds. But there are no guarantees, and with the constant threat of relapse, she resides in the same twilight they do. “If I think about it now,” she said, “it’s been harder for me than their being completely gone.” This, of course, is the mystery of all life, she said—the knowledge that one day it will end, for all of us, and the need to find a way not only to keep going but to find wonder and improbable joy in the midst of that certainty. What haunts her, Saulitis said, was no longer the prospect of a world without the AT1s but rather the day when there is only one— that last whale, calling out in its lost language to an ocean that will never yield a reply. “It’s that one,” she said, “having to live out whatever time period it can survive that way.” She thought, too, of the old Alutiiq stories of the killer whales. In their mythology, the arrival of the whales was a symbol of death itself, in all of its complexity. When there were no sick or dying, villagers worried that the killer whales would carry away the soul of a child. But when one of the elders was in the last stage of illness, the arrival of the whales signaled relief and a time for letting go. “The most dramatic contemporary version I’ve heard was over in one of the native villages across the bay,” she said. “There was a guy who was dying there of cancer, an old man. The family kept going out to see if any killer whales were coming into the bay. This guy was ready, he needed to go, and he was ready to go. But he couldn’t, so they were waiting for the killer whales to come and take his spirit. Then this small group of whales shows up in the bay, and they told him, and he died.” By embracing her new life after cancer, Saulitis is also accepting that there will be no AT1s to carry her spirit away. One day, she will be the sole carrier of their lost language and all the habits and See and hear orcas from the AT1 culture they built over millions of years. group in a multimedia gallery. onearth.org/13spr/orcas Before leaving Homer, I found a bush pilot to take me up over Kachemak Bay, a last attempt to lay eyes on a black dorsal fin before leaving Alaska. The wind was ferocious now, but the pilot came with Matkin’s highest recommendation; he had flown over Prince William Sound after the Exxon spill, radioing down information about whales he could spot from the air. I would like to say I saw a slick black fin zippering through the waves as we banked over the native village and back toward the drilling rig rising from the end of the spit, but the water below was obsidian-dark and whitecapped and, at least from our vantage, a silent void.
Chenega pulled up the boat, porpoising out of the to keep up, and Matkin tagged her with one shot
alongside easily,
water
.org
Ted Genoways is OnEarth’s editor-at-large. His book on the Hormel Foods Corporation and the American recession is forthcoming from HarperCollins. spring 2013
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How Vernal, Utah, Learned to
Big Oil b y d av i d g e s s n e r I greet you from the land of the giant white trucks.
I sit here, typing away, barricaded behind the door of the last available hotel room—the smell of smoke oozing from every fiber of polyester bedspread and carpet of this non-smoking room—in Vernal, Utah. Outside on the crowded streets hundreds of Rams and Rangers and Silverados prowl, most displaying Texas and Wyoming and Oklahoma plates. They are driven by twentysomething men who, like their trucks, are almost all white, and who congregate outside my door, talking loudly and smoking relentlessly and, quite honestly, scaring me a little. I chain-lock the door and crank up the TV. The drivers of the trucks are here for the same reason I am: the boom in drilling for oil and natural gas. The vast, dry lands south of Vernal hold about half of the state’s active rigs and present a veritable smorgasbord of opportunities for energy extraction: shale aplenty, fracking for both oil and natural gas, and even the state’s very own poised-to-open tar sands. Uintah County has been Utah’s main oil producer for more than 70 years. As far back as 1918, National Geographic extolled the area’s potential: “Campers and hunters in building fires against pieces of the rock had been surprised to find that they ignited, that they contain drilling down oil.” In other words, what is happening here is no Off U.S. Highway 40 in nouveau drilling dalliance, no young sweetheart in Duchesne County, Utah, first flush, freshly wooed, like the Bakken Field in “nodding donkeys” pump North Dakota, but an on-again, off-again affair that oil from the rich deposits has been going on for decades. of the Uintah Basin. p h o t o g r a p h s
b y
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It is that affair that interests me, with all the salacious details of how Big Oil sidles up to a town, flirts with it, and wins it over. Not to mention what happens if—or, more accurately, when—the wooer decides to ditch the wooed. In Vernal, population 9,000, evidence of earlier wooing abounds. A quick ride around town reveals Big Oil’s equivalent of a dozen roses or a box of candy. There are shiny new schools and municipal buildings and ballparks. The Western Park Convention Center, covering 32 acres, is one of the largest buildings of its kind in the West. Not every town hosts a golf tournament called Petroleum Days or throws a music festival—like last summer’s weekend-long Country Explosion—cosponsored by a maker of centrifuges and mud/gas separators. Then there’s the Uintah Basin Applied Technology College, a beautiful sandstone building with the streamlined look of a brand-new upscale airport. On my first visit to Vernal, in the heat of July, I peeked in on a class called Well Control, where a movie was being shown that, unlike the grainy safety films of my youth, had the production values of a Spielberg movie. There were models of oil derricks in the lobby, with the name Anadarko, the giant Texas oil company that is one of the area’s main employers, prominently displayed. In this case, Anadarko’s particular bouquet was a $1.5 million gift for construction and faculty endowment. It was a short drive over to the rec center, a looming spectacle of oaken beams and concrete and great sheets of glass that revealed within Olympic-size pools and running tracks and climbing walls and squash courts. It looked as if Frank Lloyd Wright and Frank Shorter had gotten together to build their dream house. This building points to one of the less obvious ways the town has been wooed. While Anadarko alone paid $14 million in county property taxes last year, the total income for Vernal and Uintah County from oil and gas far exceeds this number, as a result of sales tax, production taxes, mining royalties, and lease payments on federal land. In other words, the building is not a gift outright but the metaphoric equivalent of Big Oil saying, “Here, honey, go buy yourself something nice.” On that first day back in July, I drove from the rec center to Main Street, rejoining the white truck parade past classic strip malls and an abundance of hotels. (The Holiday Inn, many locals would tell me, was rented out for a year in advance by Halliburton—before it was even completed.) At the chamber of commerce, when I mentioned concerns about the environmental consequences of the boom, a young woman named Misty smiled at me from behind the counter and said: “It’s an oil field town and everyone makes money from the oil field. Treehuggers should go somewhere else.” From there I climbed back in my car and was drawn like a magnet to a big sign that said: I ª Drilling! It pointed toward a small shop called Covers & Camo that made custom seat covers and was bedecked with stickers and filled with souvenirs, all professing love for the pursuit of gas and oil. Inside, wearing a big straw hat and a T-shirt sporting the same words that adorned the sign outside, was George Burnett, the affable, slightly manic owner. I was surprised to learn that his business really had nothing to do with drilling. George had opened his first shop, Mr. Trim Seat Covers, back in Provo, Utah, 25 years before. But then the economy started to crater and no one could afford a truck, let alone covers for the seats of a truck. A friend told him about Vernal, where the latest oil and gas boom would mean not just plenty of trucks but truck owners with money to spend. Business was slow at first, but then George found his gim5 0 onearth
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mick: I ª Drilling! He put up his signs, made signs of the times his T-shirts, and suddenly was the talk of the Vernal residents like to town, all the drivers honking their horns as wear their feelings on they passed his shop. Only a few gave him their sleeves (and their what he called “the single-finger salute.” aprons and bumper George pointed to his pride and joy: an old stickers). In his juice black-and-white photo he’d had blown up and bar, George Burnett, made into a poster. It showed three women in lower left, has a twohard hats and one-piece bathing suits riding on tier pricing policy. a truck bed that featured an undeniably phallic Conservatives pay $4.95 10-foot-tall wooden oil derrick with black papier- for his smoothies. And maché oil gushing out of its top. The photo was liberals? A dollar more. of the 1953 Oil Progress Parade down Main Street, an event that George had exactly recreated the previous summer, right down to the derrick, the one-pieces, and the vintage truck. At the top of the list of funders was Halliburton.
IN THE BREW HAUS For all Vernal’s riches, there is some fear that boom is
becoming bust, with oil prices falling and natural gas abundant. If so, it won’t be the first time. Since its initial boom, in 1948, Vernal has been riding these waves up and down, the boom of the early 1980s crashing hard and then rising again only to crash in the early 2000s. During these dark times, no matter how hard the town ªed oil, oil didn’t ª them back. If a lesson was to be learned, it would seem to be one of caution, but as soon as oil returned, the town threw itself back into the industry’s big arms. That was the George W. Bush boom, which included a last-minute gift of almost 3,000 more permits. This turned into the Obama boom, which continues to this moment. But for all the bunting and cheers, some people are wary. Did oil really ª them? They had been burned before. From George’s Covers & Camo to the Dinosaur Brew Haus is less than a 50-yard walk, and I learned there that not everyone in Vernal is as gung ho about oil as George Burnett. The place was bustling as I jockeyed my way through the crowd. My working method as a writer over the past few years has boiled down to the first line of a joke: A man walks into a bar. I’ve found drinking with the locals to be a good way to take a town’s temperature, and, sure enough, before I’d had two sips of beer, I was listening to a tall, bearded man describe the joys of fracking. “What the eco types will tell you is that it contaminates the water,” he yelled over the din. “But if you know anything at all about it, you know that the water’s here. And the gas is here.” He held one hand down low and another above to illustrate. I listened to him for a while, not voicing my doubts, until he got bored with proselytizing and moved on. Almost immediately I found myself talking to the next guy down the bar, who turned out to be a geologist. Though he, too, worked in the oil fields, he was skeptical when I told him the theory I’d just heard. “That’s great,” he said. “But just ask that guy one question. What happens if there is an earthquake?” He didn’t seem to be actually predicting one as much as tweaking those who spoke with the fervor of certainty. After a while the crowd thinned out, and I took a seat near the wall, scribbling notes on napkins. Above me was a picture of a rugged man, gray at the temples, obviously a river guide, in a scene of craggy rock and white water. Eavesdropping on the table next to me, I learned that there were still people who had been drawn to Vernal not for oil
but for water. Most of the party were river guides, and when I asked about the photo, one of them told me it was a legendary local riverman, Don Hatch, whose son John, exemplifying the town’s strange mix, had gone into the oil business. Misty at the chamber of commerce had said that treehuggers should get out of town, but here was a table full of them, mixing with the roughnecks. “Nobody graduates from high school in Vernal anymore,” said Jeff Hommel, one of the guides. “They think they don’t need to since they can make $70,000 to $80,000 out in the oil fields.” Looking at my napkins from the night, I find one name scribbled several times: Herm Hoops. I was told that he was an old-time river rat who, unlike most, was frank about what oil had done to the town. “He spoke out at the last town meeting,” one napkin says. And after that, barely legible: “People wanted to kill him.”
ONE MAN’S TOWN I wasn’t able to track down Herm Hoops on that first
trip to Vernal, which is one of the reasons I’ve come back. Returning, my first stop was the Dinosaur Brew Haus, where I met a man named Rich, who works out on the oil fields. He contained in one person the odd mix of oil and water I’d noticed on my last visit. An ATV instructor, kayaker, scuba diver, and former ski patrol emergency medical technician, he’d moved west seven years before from upstate New York in search of adventure and opportunity in the booming oil fields, just as earlier adventurous easterners had been drawn westward to search for gold, beaver, silver, uranium, you name it. Rich now spent his days driving from drill site to drill site, where his perfectly metaphorical job was to separate oil from water in the condensate tanks next to the wellheads. “Some days I don’t see a single person,” he said. “It’s dangerous. When the weather’s bad that red dirt turns to snot. We had five water tankers roll over last year. But it’s by far the best money I ever made in my life.” In his late 40s, Rich is older than the standard caricature of the oil 5 2 onearth
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field worker. He likes Vernal, lives near the rec center, but prefers to get his exercise by exploring the surrounding canyons, lakes, and arches by foot, ATV, and dirt bike. When I told him I had never been on an ATV, he asked if I wanted to go for a ride the next morning, and I, to my own surprise, said yes. Which is how I ended up trying to tame a wild ATV. Rich said that the shifting and driving were simple, and I’m sure they were to him. But I managed to fall off after only about 100 yards, accelerating when I meant to brake, and then the willful machine decided to run over my meet the locals Herm Hoops, left, repairs and restores river rafts at his home. At the Dinosaur Brew Haus in Vernal, the author befriended an oil field worker from New York State, below, who was attracted to Utah by high-paying work in the industry but also loves hiking in the surrounding wilderness.
leg. It was not, as I first suspected, broken, and I made it a good half hour before falling off again, diving for safety as the ATV turned over. “You performed a textbook roll,” Rich said. It was the single compliment he would pay me over the course of the ride. The more I got to know Rich, the more I liked him. Earlier we had hiked up to see Moonshine Arch, and I noted that he, unlike me, did so rapidly and without a single gasp for air. He was a fit, adventurous single man, and I could understand the appeal of heading out to the oil fields to cash in for a while, the way my friends went to Alaska to fish when we were in our 20s. As for the ATVs, Rich again subverted the caricature. Safety-conscious, he outfitted us in helmets and chest pads. We didn’t drink anything stronger than water, and when we stopped he would say, “Isn’t it great to be out here in such a beautiful place?” If you ask current residents what exactly Big Oil has given them, the answer is usually jobs. And it’s true: jobs have been gained, hundreds of them, and Uintah County has the lowest unemployment rate in the state at 3.9 percent. But most of these jobs are for transient outsiders. Jobs in services, oil and gas mining, and government have all increased dramatically in the past 10 years, but only mining and government pay
illustration by bruce morser
better than the national average; service wages lag far behind. For Rich, however, it was a good deal all around. He considered himself a nature lover— “being out in it” was one reason he gave for loving the job. The larger repercussions of what he was doing didn’t concern him. He was simply there to do a job, cash in, get out. What was the big deal? Herm Hoops, when I finally got to see him later that afternoon, had an answer to that question. After saying good-bye to Rich, I drove out east of Vernal, past a life-size pink dinosaur, to Herm’s house. A big man with a thick beard and an easy manner, he greeted me in his driveway wearing just shorts and a T-shirt despite the afternoon chill. Part of the big deal, Herm explained, is that by doing his job, Rich makes it hard for others, like Herm, a river rafter, to do theirs. “When I take people down to raft Desolation Canyon, the single
thing they talk about now is the number of oil wells they see. That’s not what they paid for. They paid to get away from it all. Not be in the thick of it. They say oil is good for business. Not for my business.” We sat in Herm’s living room, a cozy place with a lit Christmas tree, a glass case featuring Civil War figurines, two kittens that crawled all over me, and a fine view of the sun’s late red glow on Split Mountain in Dinosaur National Monument. “When I first came here in the seventies, it was a beautiful place,” Herm said. “A lazy Main Street lined with cottonwoods. The old booms had faded, and the two top businesses in town were agriculture and tourism. People came to see the dinosaur quarry at the park. People came to float on the river.” He held out his large hands, palms up. “And what are we left with now?” Certainly not tourism. A tourist would be hard pressed to find a hotel room in Vernal. In fact, while oil jobs and the services that support them have been rising, the numbers of people employed in agriculture and recreation have fallen dramatically. And then there were the busts. Herm remembers the last one. Storage lockers of people’s possessions being auctioned off. Houses
from nrdc whose land is it?
Sharon Buccino
Director of NRDC’s land and wildlife program and an expert on the use of public lands
As Bernard DeVoto eloquently observed, extractive industries often provide short-term benefits but leave lasting harm. How can we deliver sustainable prosperity to communities like Vernal? Companies like Anadarko must incorporate the impacts of drilling into the cost of doing business. A community center can have lasting benefit, but the companies drilling in Utah should also install the pollution controls that keep the air clean to breathe, so that Vernal residents are healthy enough to enjoy it. Anadarko has taken some of these pollution control steps. Other companies need to follow suit. They should also invest in meaningful reclamation where they have drilled. When the last bulldozers and drilling rigs have left, companies should be able to say this land is as good as, and in some cases better than, before. NRDC recently sued the Obama administration over drilling in Utah’s Desolation Canyon area. Why? The Bureau of Land Management has described Desolation Canyon, a proposed wilderness area, as one of the largest unprotected roadless areas in the lower 48 states. Yet the BLM authorized more than 200 wells within the canyon wilderness despite numerous opportunities to access the oil and gas elsewhere. NRDC does not oppose drilling everywhere, but it will go to court to keep drilling out of our last lands with wilderness quality. The Wilderness Act of 1964 declares a national policy to protect those areas “where the earth and community of life are untrammeled by man.” The administration’s decision to approve drilling in Desolation Canyon runs directly contrary to what the Wilderness Act set out to do. Groups like NRDC are often criticized for always saying no and standing in the way of progress. Where is NRDC saying yes? It’s a misperception that we’re always saying no. We’re saying yes to a secure, prosperous, and healthy energy future. We said yes to drilling by Gasco Energy in the Uintah Basin—just not in our last wild lands. NRDC went to court as a last resort. We aggressively sought a win-win solution that would have authorized more than 1,000 wells but kept the company out of the areas citizens valued most for recreation, beauty, and solitude. We’ve also said yes to renewable energy zones on public lands, putting large-scale solar and wind projects where they can deliver the most energy with the least environmental damage. And we are saying yes to the energy-efficiency measures and renewables the nation needs to replace harmful fossil fuels.
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foreclosed. He is not against drilling, he told me, but what is lacking is perspective and ment and facilities owned long-term thinking. The problem is exemplified by the archetypal Vernal high school by Savage Services are ubiquitous. The company student who drops out, lured by the chance motto: We’re Not Afraid to to make money working in the oil fields, and buys a house, a big truck, some ATVs. Get Our Hands Dirty. “What happens if that job goes away?” Herm asked. “He is left with no education, many debts.” In fact, at the public meeting where Herm questioned the oil orthodoxy, a boy just like that stood up and said, “If we don’t keep drilling, how will I pay for everything?” Herm wasn’t trying to drive oil out of town. He was merely suggesting that Vernal proceed with some restraint and consider investing in the future. For that he was greeted with fury, even death threats. Over the past 40 years Herm had seen Big Oil bring its gifts, and its gifts were shiny. But he had also seen oil and chemicals foaming and floating down the Green River. He had seen rising crime, prostitution, spousal abuse, and a culture defined by the twentysomething males who come to work the oil fields. (Utah has a higher incidence of rape than the national average, and Uintah County has a much higher rate than the state as a whole.) Air quality has dramatically worsened; last winter’s ozone levels in the county rivaled those of Los Angeles. All this has made Herm a little less giddy than most about Vernal’s prospects. “I’ve been through it before,” he said. “They come into your neighborhood. They change your neighborhood. Then they move away. And we’re left to pick up the pieces and pay the bills.” As I drove back into town I brooded. I had tried to keep an open mind about the relationship between Big Oil and Vernal, and I couldn’t deny the many obvious benefits that oil money has brought. I’ve even felt at moments, when talking to Rich or George or amid the bustle of the Brew Haus, that there is really nothing wrong with riding a wave, with accepting “reality.” Why be a spoiler at the party? Maybe because the party always ends. keep on truckin’
In Utah’s oil fields, equip-
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FROM ABOVE I’ve brought a book along on my second trip to
Vernal, The Western Paradox, by the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Bernard DeVoto. Its pages bristle with energy; it insists on being read. DeVoto was an intellectual descendant of Major John Wesley Powell, the famous geologist who, in 1869, became the first European to float down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. Both Powell and DeVoto were forerunners of thinkers such as Wallace Stegner, who wrote a brilliant biography of Powell, and Marc Reisner, whose Cadillac Desert tells the dark story of water manipulation in the arid West. Together these writers have created a counter-narrative of the region. DeVoto was writing in the 1940s and 1950s, but the enemies he faced might as easily have been from the 1850s or from today. Those enemies said that the land was vast, and that taking what that vast land had to offer was a westerner’s birthright. That was and remains a hard argument to fight against. DeVoto didn’t care if it was hard. He had watched too many places be cored out. Too many places where the citizenry was seduced by the dream of riches, only to be left empty in the end. Locals might convince themselves that it was a mutual commitment. We ª each other. But despite the companies’ promises, there was never any true commitment to the places they were emptying of fuels or minerals. DeVoto asked a simple question: can you show me a single time when a company didn’t leave after taking all it wanted or needed? Here in five words is his summary of the extractive industries: “All mining exhausts the deposit.” Those words are as relevant in 2013 as they were in 1947. But while I admire DeVoto’s sweep and scope, I usually admire it from afar. When the man I am walks into a bar and talks to people, he understands why those people do what they do. They want money for schools, money for big white trucks, money for themselves and their kids. They want petroleum golf tournaments and fancy rec centers. Like most of us, they see things in the short term.
But there are times when the big picture is hard to avoid, and in hum. Rectangles near the unique Fremont defensive armaments on Vernal I had a rare opportunity. I got to gaze down at the town from rock spires by the river, and rectangles near the largest known Ute far above in a small plane piloted by Bruce Gordon of EcoFlight, a non- petroglyph panel in upper Desolation Canyon. To get from rectangle to rectangle, the giant white trucks needed profit organization that sponsors flights over the western landscape. It was a startling experience: what was theoretical became actual. roads. So what had once been roadless wilderness was now a spiderweb. These were the places, these were the fields where the white trucks These were the roads that my new friend Rich spent his days driving, went during the day before coming back to rest at night in front of all and they were everywhere. One of them, Seep Ridge Road, will lead to the new tar sands right at the foot of the beautiful and previously isolated those hotel rooms. “Most people driving through just see a few sites from the road and Book Cliffs. This particular road will be 49 miles long and paved, the land have no idea,” Bruce said. “But from up here you can see the extent of it.” scraped 100 feet wide to provide for a 55-mile-an-hour, two-lane highway. The geography of hopelessness. I scribbled those words in my jourWe are fooled by the land’s vastness; we can’t believe it can be ruined. But this is a failure of the imagination. Scar this dry landscape, nal. I thought of how Stegner and DeVoto knew that water was the most precious resource of all, and how below me the Green and the and the scars remain. Not 10 minutes outside of Vernal the land quickly rose and grew White rivers ran through what had been raw wilderness and was wilder, with the Green River—Powell’s river and Herm’s—carving now industrial hive. I asked Steve who owned the land we had looked down at. It was beautiful and snakelike through a sere landscape of purple and yellow. All that great, empty, unpeopled space, still looking like, as Wallace mostly public land, he said, some administered by the Bureau of Land Management and some by the U.S. Forest Service. Stegner called it, “the geography of hope.” In other words, we own this land. It belongs to all of But on second glance you saw the straight, squared David Gessner travels to the philous; it’s our American land, our heritage. lines that didn’t quite fit in nature, the rectangles that sophical edges of the planet in his You would be wise not to make that case too loudly turned out to be the hundreds of drilling pads and Wild Life blog. onearth.org/wildlife in Vernal. I wouldn’t want to walk out on my hotel evaporation ponds that dotted the area. The land was scarred; in places it looked as if someone had taken a knife to a balcony and announce that this land is my land, public land that the oil companies are coring out for profit. “Your land?” most people in beautiful woman’s face. With me in the small plane were two staff members of the Southern Vernal would respond incredulously. It’s our land, they would counter. Our birthright. And, they might Utah Wilderness Alliance, Ray Bloxham and Steve Bloch. “They used to say that the vegetation would eventually reclaim the sites,” Steve said add, if we want to trade our birthright for a climbing wall or a fancy through the headset. “But scientists no longer think so. Not enough petroleum college, then we damn well will. It is an argument that is hard to counter. And I have no doubt it will water for the vegetation to regrow.” As the flight continued, down to the Book Cliffs and Desolation ring out here forever. Or at least until the wooing is over, and Vernal, Canyon, we saw hundreds more rectangles. Rectangles up in the high, along with its oil and gas, lies exhausted. forested mountains where black bear roam in the greatest concentration in the state. Rectangles near the Sand Wash, where rafters who David Gessner is a contributing editor to OnEarth. His book on Edward Abbey, put in to retrace Powell’s journey were now serenaded by an industrial Wallace Stegner, and the American West, Properly Wild, will be published in 2014.
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Reviews
wordsimagesideas
Pandora’s lunchbox How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal by melanie Warner Scribner, 288 pp., $26
Pretty Poison
I Charity Burggraaf/ Getty Images
Food technology has transformed the contemporary diet in strange and scary ways by jocelyn C. Zuckerman
nquiries into the American food system are becoming something
of a national fetish. In the past decade or so, we’ve seen the publication of Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation, Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma, Barry Estabrook’s Tomatoland, and Tracy McMillan’s American Way of Eating. Though less concerned with the environmental and societal ramifications of our nation’s multibillion-dollar processed-food industry, Melanie Warner’s Pandora’s Lunchbox: How Processed Food Took Over the American Meal follows directly in the footsteps of this illustrious quartet, right down to the kitschy cover art. (While Schlosser’s features a 1950s-era carton exploding with fries and McMillan’s some old-school canned vegetables, Warner’s publishers give us a stylized mound of individually wrapped neon-orange Kraft Singles.) Warner’s particular obsession took hold after an incident with a tub of guacamole. In the spring of 2012, the writer’s eighty-something mom wandered into her daughter’s kitchen and inadvertently pulled from the fridge what was then a nine-month-old container of the dip. She dug in—and was none the worse for it. How could it be, wondered Warner, who had covered the food industry for the New York Times, that a supposedly “fresh” product could sit for nearly a year without betraying even the slightest hint of decomposition? Examining the ingredients label, the reporter came across the words
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text-instant and amigum. She was off and running. Warner devotes a decent amount of ink to the past, considering, for example, how the combination of urbanization and the ballooning numbers of women in our nation’s workforce led to a premium on things like uniformity, durability, and convenience— and eventually to the sorts of manipulated foods that have come to define our collective diet. We learn about extrusion machines, which we have to thank for breakfast cereals in the shapes of hearts and clovers but which, in ripping apart the sugar, starch, and protein molecules, also obliterated whatever flavor or nutritional value they might once have had. Hence the industry’s impulse to inject synthetic flavorings and vitamins. The technological advances of the last centur y, Warner writes, have brought this country to a point where we now derive some 70 percent of our calories from processed foods (which she defines as “something that cannot be made, with the same ingredients, in a home kitchen”). She wants to know at what cost. Not to our bottom line— the amount Americans pay for food has declined dramatically over the past six decades, from 20.6 percent of disposable income in 1950 to 9.8 percent today (no nation spends a lower percentage on its eating)—but to our health. “If we really are what we eat,” she says in the book’s introduction, “then Americans are a different dietary species from what we
were at the turn of the twentieth century. As a population, we ingest double the amount of added fats, half the fiber, 60 percent more added sugars, three and a half times more sodium, and infinitely greater quantities of corn and soybean ingredients than we did in 1909.” Surely this “wholesale remaking of the American meal” must be taking a toll. If it is, says Warner, the Food and Drug Administration isn’t telling us about it. The regulatory agency charged with overseeing our dietary health, she writes, is basically asleep at the wheel. In particular, she takes issue with its reliance on what it calls GRAS (generally recognized as safe) notifications, under which the industry essentially gets to monitor itself and to notify the FDA of new—and potentially harmful—ingredients only if it feels like it (see Barry Estabrook, “Out to Lunch,” OnEarth, Winter 2012–2013). The agency has not even done an official count of the additives in today’s food supply, Warner writes, though a 2011 report from the Pew Charitable Trusts puts the number at a conservative 5,000. And it is troubling to learn how ubiquitous these mystery ingredients are, appearing en masse even in innocuoussounding things like a Subway Sweet Onion Chicken Teriyaki sandwich, which boasts 105 of them. The chicken portion alone harbors substances with such appetite-killing names as disodium inosinate, disodium guanylate, and thiamine hydrochloride. It gets weirder. Who knew, for example, that sodium benzoate, a preservative made from a petrochemical found in paint thinner, is to this day used in a variety of salad dressings and sodas? Or that the grease from Australian sheep’s wool is extracted in China for use not just in machine lubricants and lip glosses but in the artificial vitamin D that finds its way into our milk, organic
versions included? Who would have imagined that the azodicarbonamide in Subway’s breads is produced from hydrazine, which may be familiar to readers involved in the rubber and plastics industries? (A 2001 spill of azodicarbonamide in Chicago prompted the city to evacuate everyone within half a mile.) And how many consumers are aware of the extent to which the flavor
world has come to be dominated by enzymes made from genetically engineered bacteria? Warner carefully catalogs the health issues associated with these newfangled ingredients. We learn that because the starch in our modern food has been essentially predigested, our bodies have that much less work to do, leaving us more susceptible to diabetes and obesity;
that the synthetic vitamins in our meals—Americans now get more man-made nutrients than they do naturally occurring ones—likely don’t have their intended effects outside their natural context; and that the relatively recent replacement of trans fats in soybean oil by hydoxynonenals may ultimately prove a public-health disaster. Warner’s research takes us in-
spotlight
One Cubic Foot By David Liittschwager, University of Chicago Press, $45 The renowned nature photographer David Liittschwager has always been fascinated by the marvels of the natural world on the most intimate scale. As the biologist E. O. Wilson says in his foreword to One Cubic Foot, “When you thrust a shovel into the soil or tear off a piece of coral, you are, godlike, cutting through an entire world. You have crossed a hidden frontier known to very few.” Liittschwager’s latest work takes us across that frontier. In each new location—a cloud forest in Costa Rica, a river in Tennessee, New York City’s Central Park—he sets down a hollow metal cube, tracks the life forms that move in and out of it in the course of 24 hours, and then photographs them in all their riotous detail and diversity. Liittschwager found this translucent baby octopus on the reef encircling the island of Moorea in French Polynesia.
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reviews side “the curious, intricate world of food science and technology, a place where food isn’t so much cooked as disassembled and reassembled.” Nowhere is this alternate reality on better display than at the annual meeting of the Institute of Food Technologists, a gathering of the companies— some 900 of them—that supply ingredients to the processed-food industry. In conversation with a marketing director for an outfit called National Starch, she asks whether his product is being used as a thickener in the “Greek-style” yogurt he’s peddling. “It’s a texturing system,” he says. “We don’t like to use the term thickener.” But Warner is at her best when she turns the narrative over to some of her more colorful characters. Take James Lewis Kraft, who in 1903, at the age of 29, moved to Chicago and used his $65 savings to rent a wagon and a horse called Paddy for hawking cheese, which he would eventually figure out how to preserve indefinitely. Or Harvey W. Wiley, a Purdue University chemist who at the turn of the twentieth century routinely gathered men in the basement of Washington, D.C.’s Bureau of Chemistry and fed them meals laced with ingredients like borax, formaldehyde, and sulfuric acid. (Combined with the fallout from the publication of The Jungle by Upton Sinclair, the information about potential health hazards gleaned from Wiley’s unconventional “Poison Squad” would eventually lead to President Theodore Roosevelt’s signing of the nation’s first-ever food regulations.) Warner concedes at the outset that some won’t want to hear what she has to say, and you do get the sense in Lunchbox that she’s mostly preaching to the choir—in a way that can feel disappointingly workmanlike and bloodless. She displays none 5 8 onearth
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of the quiet indignation of Estabrook or the don’t-mess-with-me ferocity of undercover hotshot McMillan. Though we get a few glimpses inside Charlie and the Chocolate Factor y–style food plants, monumental vats and pipes ahiss, we mostly sit politely in executive conference rooms. The author’s main stumble, though, comes toward the end of the book, where she tells us not to expect the likes of Pepsi and Kraft to fix the screwed-up way we eat but to take things into our own hands. It is doable, she says, offering by way of example a California family whose 13-year-old son goes from alienated troublemaker to fully functional sweetheart, all thanks to the way he changed up his diet. The anecdote, which goes on for some 10 pages, feels bizarrely random and unscientific—don’t we all have a friend who’s recently gone paleo or vegan and blathered on with conviction about her newer, better self? In the end, Warner’s book goes down like a nutrient-rich and tasty enough kale salad, but one that might have benefited from the inclusion of a few renegade chunks of bacon. It’s a worthy addition to the ongoing conversation about how we eat in this country, and will undoubtedly play a role in what the New York Times columnist Mark Bittman recently referred to as our nascent national food revolution. “When it comes to sustainable food for billions,” Bittman wrote, “we’re the pioneers of a food movement that’s just beginning to take shape.” Warner’s portrait of the processed stuff we’ve come to call our national diet may be a mildmannered one, but if we hope to storm the barricades of the industrialized-food establishment, we’ll need every voice we can get.
.org
Food writer Jocelyn C. Zuckerman explores what and how we eat. onearth.org/jzuckerman
heat Adventures in the World’s Fiery Places BY bill streever Little, Brown and Company 368 pp., $26.99
Bill Streever’s new book,
Heat, starts out looking like the too-obvious sequel to his 2010 best seller, Cold—a collection of random but always interesting vignettes instructing readers on
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deposit of hours-old lava and feel the searing heat as he dips a geologist’s hammer into some of the still-liquid stuff. We visit an old nuclear test site, where an elderly tour guide who saw some of the tests describes two soon-tobe incinerated mannequins that testers jokingly placed in a certain sexual position. At other stops, we learn about the physics of the sun, of cooking eggs, of quarks. If that were all, well, okay. We could enjoy another round-theglobe trip of vicarious thrills and chills (or, here, heat blisters) that feeds us factoids we did not know, whether they were useful or not. But Heat aims for more. Lurking literally or metaphorically behind many stops on the heat tour is the Big One of hotness: global climate change. Little by little, it worms its way in. On a poignant visit with a California firefighter to the spot where a giant sheet of wildfire burned several of his fellows alive, we
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In the 1600s England instituted one of the world’s first carbon taxes: a levy on every chimney. (It was repealed in the 1700s, more than 300 years too early.)
the physics, biology, and history of one end of the temperature spectrum. Preferably reported from some exotic locale. Streever, a biologist in Alaska with a now successful second career as a writer, checks off this box with his new book. We learn the method by which Harry Houdini survived in an iron cage set on fire while a steak above his head cooked nicely. We view the living corpse of Pablo Valencia, an early 1900s miner who slithered across the Nevada desert lost and dying, lips and eyelids shriveled as if amputated, skin black and dry as beef jerky. We accompany Streever up a Hawaiian volcano across a still-swaying, cooling
are reminded that higher temperatures and changing rainfall patterns may well bring more such fires. Streever ably reviews how humans have moved up the ladder of fuels, from wood to oil. Along the way, it transpires that in the 1600s England instituted (in ef fect) one of the world’s first carbon taxes: a levy on every chimney, then a newfangled gizmo that became popular for channeling acrid coal smoke from houses. (It was repealed in the 1700s—more than 300 years too early, if you subscribe to that solution.) There is the strangled mummy of an Iron Age teenage girl, long preserved in a peat bog, later dug up by people
seeking to burn the peat, and now in a glass case in a Dutch museum. There are the “three million optimists” living today in the well-charted periodic blast zone of Italy’s Mount Vesuvius; and the New Age instructor who teaches paying customers how to walk across live cedar coals without getting burned—but who actively closes her ears to a scientific explanation, in favor of pure faith that people can do anything they set their minds to. (“I am convinced that if you had your shit together, and really put your mind to it, you could survive a direct nuclear blast,” says one fire-walking adherent.) Through it all, Streever builds the reader’s basic apprehension of heat in all its aspects—production, retention, effects. He gets help from people such as the early-nineteenth-century scientist Jean Baptiste Fourier, who first understood that the earth is kept comfortably warm by a providential blanket of air, which contains a smidgen of the crucial gas carbon dioxide—a gas that humans are producing so much of now, we may be tipping things into a state that soon may not be that comfortable. Streever does this in an understated—or more often unstated—way; in fact, he hardly ever mentions modern climate change by name, or what he thinks we ought to do about it. Is that dead bog girl in the glass case a mirror image of us, soon to be entombed by our own energy source? Is the fire-walking guy a climate-skeptic ideologue whose belief in human dominance has overcome his common sense? Streever doesn’t say, one way or the other. He leaves us well informed about many things, but never tells us to our face how much to sweat about them. It is up to the reader to assemble the raw, fascinating data, and to make that decision.
—kevin krajick
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The Golden Shore By David Helvarg, Thomas Dunne Books, $26.99 forget for a moment hollywood and the dodgers and the Gold Rush. Above all else, says David Helvarg, the history and identity of California are bound up with its enduring love affair with the ocean. In The Golden Shore, Helvarg, an environmental writer and filmmaker and president of the Washington, D.C.–based Blue Frontier Campaign, an ocean conservation group, takes us on a 1,100-mile journey from the Mexican border to the Oregon line. His travels encompass every imaginable facet of life along the coast, taking us from the food middens of ancient Paleo-Indian hunting parties to the bustling flight deck of an aircraft carrier off San Diego; from the surfing beaches of Malibu to the marine protected areas of the Channel Islands, where scientists are fighting to restore the historic biodiversity of the Pacific Ocean.
frankenstein’s cat Cuddling Up to Biotech’s Brave New Beasts BY emily anthes Farrar, Straus and Giroux 256 pp., $26
A DOLPHIN WITH A CARBON-
fiber tail, goats that make drugs in their milk, tunas spor ting antennae, and a cloned African wildcat named Ditteaux. Science has brought forth some strange beasts in recent years. In Frankenstein’s Cat, the journalist Emily Anthes brings us up to date on the science of tinkering with animals—cloning them, genetically modifying them, outfitting them with tracking sensors, hacking into their brains and driving them around by remote control. Although many of these
projects are motivated by the desire to benefit humans, some are designed to improve the welfare of animals, even to save species. And yet they make us . . . uneasy. At the root of this unease is the sense that altering animals with human technology is unnatural. As Anthes writes, “The genome can seem like a set of commandments—handed down and carved in stone—and fiddling with it makes us nervous.” And yet the force that has produced every animal that ever lived—evolution— works on the natural variability among genomes and produces substantial changes in them over generations. Adaptation, hybridization, speciation, and genetic drift are constantly taking place in an endless and beautiful unfolding, like shifting patterns in a kaleidoscope. Humans have leaned on genomes since prehistory, domesticating animals and applying selective pressure on wild populations. What makes technologies such as cloning seem so different is that they are fast and precise, and sometimes move genes between very different species. Anthes argues that we should assess any given biotechnical alteration on its merits, rather than just dismiss it as unnatural. Take the cloning of endangered species. When gene pools are tiny, when
extinction looms, could cloning increase diversity by adding genes from animals that are too old, infertile—or even long dead? Beyond cloning, could genetic engineering make some species more resilient to climate change and other stressors? Clearly these projects are useless without the robust protection of habitat, but Anthes thinks that “given the state of the planet, it can’t hurt to have options.” One possible objection to some of the technologies Anthes chronicles is that they diminish the wildness of the animals they seek to help. Those who see wildness as something untouched by humans will never consider a genetically modified creature to be truly wild. And they may cringe at the increasing popularity of attaching sensors and trackers to animals for purposes of scientific research, turning the planet’s mysterious beasts into the kind of creatures we encounter in Frankenstein’s Cat, like the clinical “Bear 40” or the cutesy “Jonathan Sealwart.” But the fact is that we humans already exert an adaptive pressure on every animal. And in a changing climate accompanied by the massive destruction of habitat, true wildness may be a luxury the planet can no longer afford. —emma marris
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Dispatches news and views from the natural resources defense council
Not so comfy The insides of your plush couch might be doused with toxic chemicals.
let’s not poison the sofa New regulations will help remove dangerous, unnecessary fire-retardant chemicals from our homes
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wo years ago, Sarah Janssen biopsied
her couch. After removing the cushion covers she cut out a square-inch chunk of polyurethane foam, wrapped it in tinfoil, and sent it off to a laboratory at Duke University. A senior scientist with NRDC’s health program, Janssen was participating in a study of flame-retardant chemicals in furniture. One year later the results came back. “Based on the levels they found in that sample, my couch contained a whole pound of these chemicals,” she says. Janssen lives in California, which has strict flammability standards for furniture made with highly flammable polyurethane foam. Known as Technical Bulletin 117, the guideline is designed to make sure the foam is flame-resistant. In reality, it does little to prevent fires
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because it applies only to the foam inside furniture; moreover, the flame-retardant chemicals are themselves hazardous. New regulations, formulated with input from NRDC scientists, will soon phase out the use of these chemicals. Janssen’s couch was part of a study led by Duke researchers who analyzed 102 couches from across the country and found that 85 percent contained toxic or untested flame retardants. Janssen’s couch had been made with the most common chemical: chlorinated Tris, which manufacturers voluntarily removed from children’s pajamas more than 35 years ago after it was linked to cancer. “It’s crazy that anyone thought it would be okay to put it in household furniture,” says Janssen. Chemicals like chlorinated Tris don’t stay inside your couch. Instead, these semi-volatile chemicals gradually evaporate and adhere to household dust, which can then be
opposite: Nick Veasey/Getty Images; Right: Adriana Casellato/Getty Images; Top right: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images
ingested or inhaled. Apart from the chlorinated Tris in Janssen’s couch, the second most common flame-retardant chemical found in the Duke study was pentaBDE, a hormone disruptor that can interfere with reproduction and with the neurological system. PentaBDE was phased out in the United States in 2005, but many couches and other pieces of furniture loaded with the chemical are still in homes. Since few flame-retardant substances have ever been studied, “nobody knows whether or not the rest are safe,” says Janssen. California’s current rules require only that the inside foam be flame-resistant; manufacturers realized that application of certain chemicals offered the easiest and cheapest means to meet that standard. “But fires don’t start on the inside of your couch,” Janssen says. “They start on the outside.” Californians aren’t the only ones who have to worry about toxins when they plop down on their sofas. Manufacturers treat the foam in furniture with chemicals whether or not it is sold in California, to avoid producing an entirely different product line for consumers in other states. Fortunately, the use of hazardous flame retardants will soon be a thing of the past—at least in furniture. California’s new standards, just released in February, will require that the material covering furniture (where fires actually begin) be flame-resistant, instead of the cushion foam. Janssen says this will eliminate the need for chemical treatment, since many types of fabrics are already fireresistant. Nor should the new standard raise furniture costs, since an estimated 85 percent of couch fabrics are now compliant, according to the federal Consumer Product Safety Commission. “It’s a win-win,” says Janssen. “Better fire safety and no toxic chemicals.” —Justine E. Hausheer
landing pad Lush rainforests blanket
Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula, a narrow strip of land jutting into the Pacific Ocean. It is one of the most biodiverse places on earth: its forests teem with jaguars, howler monkeys, and more than 400 bird species, from striking scarlet macaws to brilliant blue cotingas. One of its seasonal inhabitants, the yellow warbler, a tiny songbird common in the
blue skies ahead New ship rules will save lives in California.
Big ports get big solutions
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United States, migrates to the tropics each winter from as far away as Alaska, relying on the Osa’s dense forests as a refuge after the long journey. Much of this tropical ecosystem is protected, but some areas continue to be degraded by agricultural use and tourism. NRDC and partner organization Osa Conservation are restoring 50 acres of this forest by replanting native trees and plants. The property, now owned by Osa Conservation, was deforested in the 1970s and 1980s for cattle pasture, then used by a commercial logger to grow non-native tree species like teak. “By creating protected areas and national parks, Costa Rica succeeded in turning back the tide of deforestation,” says Carolina Herrera, an NRDC Latin America advocate. “But the places in between protected areas also need safeguarding.” By reviving even this small parcel of rainforest, NRDC and Osa Conservation are connecting patches of habitat to form a larger biological corridor, giving tropical species—and the familiar yellow warbler—more —J.E.H. room to fly.
os Angeles is notorious for its traffic jams and
the resulting blanket of smog. But the fumes that hover over the city don’t come from cars alone: much of the emissions emanates from the thousands of ships that dock at the area’s ports.“The local air district estimates that the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach produce more smog-forming pollution than all six million cars in the region,” says Melissa Lin Perrella, an NRDC staff attorney. Forty percent of the nation’s imports enter through the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach, adjacent facilities that form the fifth-largest port complex in the world. The ships carrying these imports burn low-grade bunker fuel, and their exhaust is packed with smog-forming chemicals as well as fine particulate matter. “When you look at those kinds of ships, you can see the smoke pouring out of them,” says Nicholas Stern, a California deputy attorney general. But ships aren’t the only polluters at the ports. Trucks, forklifts, and other equipment unloading cargo burn diesel, contributing to the problem. Port-related air pollution is a significant health hazard. Diesel emissions cause cancer and respiratory illnesses, such as aggravated asthma, and increase the risk of heart disease. An astonishing 80 percent of Californians are exposed to port-related air pollution, which can be carried inland by wind. But Californians can look forward to clearer skies ahead. With the help of NRDC, in 2006 California adopted the Vessel Fuel Rules, which require ships to use cleaner fuel within 24 nautical miles of the state’s coast. “Marine diesel contains much less sulfur” than bunker fuel, says Stern, “and when it’s burned it emits much lower levels of particulates and sulfur oxides.” The Pacific Merchant Shipping Association immediately sued, initiating a six-year legal battle in which NRDC partnered with California to defend the right to limit hazardous pollutants. After a ruling favoring NRDC and the state, the PMSA exhausted its legal options. A district court finally dismissed the case in November 2012. The Vessel Fuel Rules went into effect in 2009; the California Air Resources Board estimates that by 2015, approximately 3,500 premature deaths and nearly 100,000 asthma attacks will have been prevented. After 2015, international regulations will require ships to switch to cleaner fuels within 200 miles of U.S. and Canadian coastlines, —J.E.H. ensuring healthier air for millions of North Americans.
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TRUTH SQUAD
No, It’s not Okay to Hunt Polar Bears
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hreatened by climate change, polar bears also suffer from overhunting. Countries will vote on a U.S. proposal to outlaw the international trade in polar bear body parts at the March 2013 meeting of the Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). Canada opposes stronger protections, and distributed a fact sheet, below, to U.S. members of Congress. Elly Pepper, an NRDC legislative advocate, weighed in on these “facts.”
A Perfect Plan “We love to camp and hike,”
Canada is home to approxima tely 16,000 polar bears, which is about two-th irds of the global population... The overall Canadian polar bear population is stable and has been increasing slightly over time. W ho a— mi sl ea din g! International commercial tra de from Canada is about 2% and has remain ed at consistent and sustainable levels and is not a threat to polar bear populations. t true Actually, no Northern Aboriginal people in Canada, such as the Inuit, have the con stitutional right to manage and harvest the wil dlife within their territories. Harvest quotas are based on principles of conservation and Aboriginal subsistence, and are not market -driven, but scienceEv id en c e based. The annual harvest is around 600 bears su gg es ts or 3.75% of the total Can adian population and o th er w is e is often less than the est ablished quotas. While polar bears may face habitat changes due to climate change and other factors, CITES cannot help protect the species from climate change.
* Only three of Canada’s * Polar bear 13 polar bear populations are stable, while nine of them are declining. One very small population is increasing, but only because overhunting led to a quota reduction.
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specimens (claws, bones, bodies) exported from Canada for commercial purposes increased by 35 percent from 2001 to 2010. The wildlife trade has driven many species to the brink of extinction.
* Local wildlife man-
agement boards set polar bear quotas. They consider scientific advice, but other factors as well, resulting in quotas well above scientific recommendations. As prices for polar bear hides have risen, so have quotas.
* Climate change is
the top threat to polar bears, but the global trade in parts is the second-biggest danger. To help species challenged by climate change, other stressors must be reduced. Canadian management ignores this.
says Nancy Cruickshank. “The natural world has always been important to us.” That attraction to the outdoors has resulted in a history of commitment to NRDC, starting 30 years ago when her husband, Joe, was executive director of a large foundation that awarded grants to NRDC. In his professional career, Joe carefully evaluated organizations that might receive funding. When he left the foundation, the couple turned their attention to personal philanthropy. “We had to decide what was truly important to us,” says Joe. “NRDC really impressed us, so it was an obvious choice for our own giving.” In addition to their annual support, the Cruickshanks have established a legacy that will provide a future gift to NRDC. “It’s a perfect arrangement for us,” says Joe. “Our annual gifts support the organization for the challenges we face today, and our legacy gift will support NRDC for issues that arise in the future.” The couple is emphatic about why that future support is so critical: “Frequently we feel we have no voice when the air and water are fouled,” says Nancy. “NRDC is our voice, and we want it to remain strong even when we are gone. Individuals like us can have a greater impact by giving to NRDC, now and for the future.” 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.
fieldwork
clearing the air
Kim Knowlton uncovers the ways climate change is affecting public health.
A new prognosis A scientist monitors the inextricable connections between the planet’s fragile health and our own
photograph for onearth by jeff weiner
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by jeff turrentine
hen Kim Knowlton was only a
toddler, she found a dead bumblebee in her yard. But rather than recoil, she rejoiced. A fascinated Knowlton took the expired insect inside her house, where she performed a protracted and detailed autopsy, an experience she credits with launching her scientific career before she could even read. “I worked on that bumblebee for days,” she recalls. “It blew my mind.” Today, Knowlton combines a rigorous approach to collecting hard data with the same energizing curiosity that her preschool self brought to the task of poking around at bee wings and antennae. Her area of specialty—studying how climate change is adversely affecting human health—is still young enough that new puzzles, in ever more urgent need of solving, keep rolling in at a rapid clip. Knowlton has been a senior scientist in NRDC’s health and environment program since 2007; she is also part of the organization’s
who we are
what we do
India initiative and is a co–deputy the despair that accompanies the director of the NRDC Science Cen- loss of a home, job, or loved one. A ter. Her work allows her to play major drought like the one that hit two of her strongest cards. One is the Midwest last summer can lead a broad base of academic knowl- to an epidemic of anxiety as “whole edge, amassed during a career communities see their economic that has touched upon not only base shattered, just as happened climate change but also geology during the Dust Bowl.” And since and radiation science. The other mental health issues often go unis a deep-seated humanism that treated, “we’re dealing with a set has found expression in the arts of symptoms that don’t always get (Knowlton was a member of better over time,” she says. Recently Knowlton has noWatchface, an avant-garde performance troupe, in the 1980s) ticed an uptick in requests to and in her decision to pursue a speak about climate change and doctorate in public health. Her health. One request came from job, appropriately, is to map the an organization of municipal intersection of human and envi- clerks. She sees these clerks as “climate-change first respondronmental pathologies. What Knowlton has been ers” who may be wondering if finding there makes it clear that semi-regular calamity has behealth-related suffering attribut- come the new normal. “People able to climate change isn’t just walk into their offices and say, something we will experience if ‘Something’s wrong. We need we stay on our current path. It’s help.’” If climate-change awaresomething we’re experiencing ness is starting to make real right now. She notes that “rising headway in the American hearttemperatures are lengthening the land, one reason may well be that pollen-production season,” citing both rural and city dwellers “are a study she co-authored showing getting hammered by all these that the ragweed season in the extreme weather events, and Midwest grew by anywhere from people who are economically 13 to 27 days between 1995 and disadvantaged or underserved 2009. More heat waves mean more by doctors and health-care faciliheatstrokes, heart attacks, even ties are more vulnerable to the suicides. Increased flooding as a health effects.” As awareness continues to result of storm surges and hurgrow, Knowlricanes means an increased Visit switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/ ton hopes our kknowlton for more on public health public health risk of microinfrastrucbial or chemical contamination, as pathogens ture will grow along with it so and toxins are whisked down that we can meet what she deems the “preparedness chalstreams that used to be streets. One relatively uncharted fron- lenge.” It’s a challenge that is tier Knowlton feels compelled to clearly already upon us. “We explore further is the link between need to wrap our heads around disasters related to climate change one basic fact,” she says. “These and mental health. Among the events are much worse, and are aftermaths of an event like Hur- happening at a much faster rate, ricane Sandy, she says, can be than they were before.”
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open space stinking up the great outdoors
the body’s warning devices. The odor of rotten food prevents us from Everett, Washington, a Puget Sound mill poisoning ourselves, just as the scent of smoke alerts us to the prestown 31 miles north of Seattle, prospered from ence of fire. So it shouldn’t come as a shock to discover that unpleasant the 1930s to the 1970s thanks in part to three odors, no matter how benign, can trigger physiological reactions. The growth of stench-spewing industrial hog farms in the 1990s gave pulp and paper mills that pumped out rottenegg vapors morning, noon, and night. “Smells rise to studies of the effects of malodor on nearby residents. They relike money,” my elders said. I’d always considered that a clever local ported headaches, nausea, fatigue, increased anxiety and stress, and the loss of the simple pleasure of stepping witticism. Then I made my way into the outdoors. Scientists found that malodor wider world and realized it was an ancan be an environmental stressor as cient adage—Pecunia non olet (“Money powerful as noise, heat, or crowds. does not stink”), said the Roman emIn a 2009 article in the International peror Vespasian. What we didn’t know Journal of Neuroscience, Rachel Herz then, or chose to ignore, was that the of Brown University Medical School stench went hand in hand with sulfite brought the term aromachology—the waste liquors and sludge deposits that data-based study of odor effects—into were poisoning Puget Sound. scientific use. Herz believes that odor Recently a new fragrance arose in acts as a psychological trigger. “The Everett and Marysville, its northern chemical nature of the odorant” plays neighbor. Local residents are coma secondary role, she writes. It’s the plaining about the god-awful smell “meaning of the aroma that induces coming from a factory on the edge of the consequent psychological and/or town. What’s unusual is the source. It’s physiological responses.” a soil composting facility—a reminder In other words, my elders in Everett that environmental progress isn’t a onedidn’t merely tolerate the pulp mill stink time, problem-solved kind of thing. as the unpleasant price to be paid for Gardeners in the Pacific Northwest family-wage jobs. It might actually have treasure the rich, organic spreadables pleased them because it was associated from Cedar Grove, a compost company. in their minds with prosperity. Cedar Grove obtains its raw material Modern-day residents of Everett and from Seattle, whose residents have Marysville seem to have enjoyed—or recycled their yard waste for decades. The growth of stench-spewing at least tolerated—the bittersweet Since 2004 Cedar Grove has trucked industrial hog farms in the 1990s smell of composting yard waste as the the clean-green tonnage to Everett, gave rise to studies of the effects of fragrance of clean, green recycling. where it’s allowed to degrade in outdoor With the addition of kitchen scraps, mounds. Clippings in, compost out. For malodor on nearby residents though, the decomposing mounds a time, olfactory tranquillity reigned. Then came the food waste. In 2009 Seattle began requiring residents took on a scent associated with something primitively bad: rotting of single-family homes to recycle their kitchen scraps. What once food. Evolution has trained our brains to interpret that as an alarm. Cedar Grove executives are now negotiating with city and state smelled like sweet grass clippings began to stink like rotting garbage. In an earlier era, town officials would have told the complainers to lump officials to put an end to the malodorous affair. Those in the odorit. “The smell of money!” But medical researchers know more now about control industry are invited to visit my old hometown and size what they call malodor and its effect on the mind and body. Chief among up this unique business opportunity. It’s easy to find. Just drive their findings is that air pollution doesn’t have to be toxic to be harmful. northwest until you smell it. Our olfactory system has the ability to flood the body with intense sensations, whether it’s the nostalgic pleasure of a Christmas tree or Bruce Barcott is a contributing editor to OnEarth. He lives on Bainbridge the repulsive reflex of vomit. Our sense of smell also acts as one of Island, Washington, where compost is highly prized.
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y hometown stank. Literally.
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illustration by blair thornley
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BY bruce barcott