Elizabeth Kolbert: answers from the past
A Survival Guide for the Planet • published by the natural resources defense council
GENERATION
ToXic
our kids’ brains are at risk from a barrage of everyday chemicals
By Florence Williams
PLUS
Gretel Ehrlich rides Alaska’s wild Kobuk river
So what’s an aquifer? We explain.
winter 2013 /2014 w w w.one arth.org
TOOLS
for a
WOrLD of ChaNgE
american exodus
across north america, rising sea levels, devastating droughts and superstorms will diminish agricultural and economic carrying capacity by two thirds and ravage the habitability of our continent. Waves of environmental refugees will travel poleward as southern conditions worsen. Northern lands are our Noah’s ark – a vital refuge against the moment of mankind’s greatest need.
Climate Change and the Coming Flight for Survival
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giles slade is an award winning environmentalist. His other books include Made to Break and The Big Disconnect.
Seeking higher ground – how rising global temperatures will lead to unprecedented human migration
Holding this book should feel like the touch of a cattle prod. But most of us have hides too thick to feel the shock and we will need several more, of ever-higher voltage, before we heed its message. — Clive Hamilton, author of Earthmasters: The Dawn of the Age of Climate Engineering
Underminers
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A Guide to Subverting The Machine
Conservation, Solar Power, Organic Gardening, and Other Hands-On Skills from the Appropriate Tech Toolkit
Keith Farnish US/Can $19.95 Every now and again a book claws its way through the cracks in the concrete slabs of greenwash, timidity and shallow thinking, and – gasping for air – demands our fullest attention.... Underminers is one of those rare few. —Mark Boyle, author, The Moneyless Manifesto and The Moneyless Man
John miChael greer US/Can $18.95 If there were a class on green living, this would be the ideal text! —Deborah Niemann, author, Homegrown and Handmade, Ecothrifty, and Raising Goats Naturally
art of social enterprise
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Business as if People Mattered
How to Save Money, Time and Resources through Collaborative Consumption
Carl FranKel and allen BromBerger US/Can $21.95 A must-read work of art about the art of social enterprise. —Doug Hammond, founding partner, Burns & Hammond, and former executive director, the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies
Browsing nature’s aisles A Year of Foraging for Wild Food in the Suburbs Wendy BroWn and eriC BroWn US/Can $17.95 Browsing Nature’s Aisles is a great read for those who dream of getting back to the land and becoming more self-sufficient, yet don’t know where to start. —Thomas J. Elpel, author, Botany in a Day: The Patterns Method of Plant Identification
Beth BUCzynsKi US/Can $17.95 Sharing is Good is a great guide to help all of us start consuming less and sharing more. — Randy Paynter, Founder of Care2.com
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Uprisings A Hands-On Guide to the Community Grain Revolution sarah simpson and heather mcleod US/Can $19.95 Uprisings provides lots of loaves of inspiration and knowledge to enable you and your community to join the revival of small-scale grain production. —Dan Jason, owner of Salt Spring Seeds
Available at fine bookstores and ebook retailers, online at www.newsociety.com or call 1 800 567 6772
contents
Onearth magazine
volume 35 number 4 winter 2013/2014
FE ATUR ES
d e part m ents
8 From the Editor 14 WHERE ONEARTH
38 The River and The Road
by Gretel Ehrlich
A snorkeler’s-eye view of the majestic, magnificent Great Barrier Reef can render one dizzy.
Float down the remote Kobuk River and you’re likely to en-
17 FRONTLINES
counter grizzlies, salmon, bald
Wind, solar ... and pizza? Anaerobic digestion may take “waste not, want not” to the next level. Plus: meet the proudest fellow in the oyster parade.
eagles, and caribou. Oh—and open-pit mines, if the governor of Alaska gets his way.
Q&A Ted Genoways talks to the mayor who challenged Big Oil to a public showdown over bringing tar sands to his small town in Maine.
46 Aquifer Alert by Kristen French and Jim Kopp
24 the synthesist
Stretching across eight states, the Ogallala aquifer is the lifeblood of agriculture on the Great Plains. But can it survive a future of drought,
cover story
28
pollution, and pipelines?
48 A World Away by Jocelyn C. Zuckerman
That palm oil listed in the ingredients of your favorite candy bar or lipstick: more and
From the preschool parking lot to the playground, from the TV room to the kitchen table, young children are exposed to a daily barrage of chemicals that have toxic effects on the developing brain.
more of it comes from the vanishing forests of Africa, razed by multinational corporations.
Generation ToXic by Florence Williams
inside n rd c
10 view from nrdc by Frances Beinecke
12 the deans list by Bob Deans
60 dispatches
The supermarket dating game, cleaning L.A.’s water; and more.
A generation ago, after federal regulations steadily eliminated lead from the environment, we breathed a collective sigh of relief that our kids would be safe from the threat of this potent neurotoxin. Now, new scientific research suggests that an array of chemicals in common use may pose a threat every bit as great.
Cover and above: Photographs by Clarissa Bonet
by Kim Tingley The mysterious patterns known as fractals exist where nature, art, and higher math all meet. They may be clues to a hidden natural order.
26 think again
by Elizabeth Kolbert As we race toward the Next Big Sustainable Idea, it’s worth pausing to check the rearview mirror.
56 reviews
The global trade in scrap is a $500 billion industry. Filthy as it may sound, it’s also an exercise in recycling on a massive scale.
64 open space
by Sharman Apt Russell Remember the spotted owl? Out in the forests of New Mexico it’s still possible to meet one. Or even two.
onearth online visit onearth.org
Read the digital edition of the magazine on your computer, e-reader, or tablet device, and access complete back issues at onearth.org/digital
winter 2013/2014
onearth 1
caravan
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Executive Editor
Your Caravan tour begins with a 2-night stay at Panama City, then spend 2-nights at Rainforest Hotel, cruise jungle canals, Gatun Lake and the Panama Canal, enjoy a relaxing 2-night stay at Playa Blanca Beach Resort, then return for an overnight stay at Panama City to end your tour
ARTICLES Editor editor, ONEARTH.ORG senior editor, onearth.org Managing Editor, Onearth.org news blogger
Douglas S. Barasch Managing Editor
Janet Gold
Jeff Turrentine
Scott Dodd Melissa Mahony Susan Cosier Jason Bittel
Art Director gail Ghezzi Photo Editor Gail Henr y
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editor-at-large Ted Genoways
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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, Jocelyn C. Zuckerman
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publisher Lisa Benenson Deputy Publisher Francesca Koe Special Adviser Nicholas Lemann Editorial Board Wendy Gordon, Chair; Robert Bourque,
Chris Calwell, Amanda Eaken, Dan Fagin, Henr y Henderson, Tar yn Kiekow, Kim Knowlton, Josephine A. Merck, Patricia F. Sullivan, Alisa Valderrama, John Walke, Andrew Wetzler
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Ex Officio Frances Beinecke, Peter Lehner, Jack Murray Founder John H. Adams
at much lower prices than you can find anywhere else. Tax, fees extra. Call now for choice dates!
Generous support for Onearth is provided by Furthermore: a program of the J.M. Kaplan Fund The Josephine Patterson Albright Fund for Feature Reporting The Vervane Foundation The Sunflower Foundation The Jonathan and Maxine Marshall Fund for Environmental Journalism
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advertising : 212-727-4577 or adsales@onearth.org Editorial: 212-727-4412 or onearth@nrdc.org E ditorial Pur pose
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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.
About N R DC NRDC is a national nonprofit organization with 1.4 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. NR DC Offices 40 West 20th St. New York, NY 10011 212-727-2700
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onearth (issn 1537-4246) (volume 35, number 4) is published quarterly by the Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 40 West 20th St., New York, NY 10011, and printed by The Lane Press, South Burlington, Vermont. Newsstand circulation through Disticor Magazine Distribution Services; info@disticor.com. Copyright 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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All-meals included in Costa Rica Tax and fees extra. Day 1 San JosĂŠ, Costa Rica Caravan welcomes you to the “Rich Coast,â€? friendly land of democracy and rare natural beauty. See exotic birds and wildlife, hike in rainforests, view volcanoes, soak in hot-springs and cruise through biological reserves. Caravan provides transfer from Juan Santamaria International Airport to your hotel. Dinner. Day 2 PoĂĄs Volcano " famous coffee growing region. Visit PoĂĄs Volcano. See inside the active crater from an overlook. Hike Escallonia Cloud Forest Trail. Lunch. Visit Cafe Brit, a coffee plantation nestled on the slopes of the extinct Barva Volcano. Dinner. Day 3 Rainforest Aerial Tram " de la Cultura, Central Park and the National Theatre. Pass through the lush vegetation of Braulio Carrillo Park. Then, glide through the jungle canopy on the world famous Rainforest Aerial Tram, rated one of " Lunch. Visit a pineapple plantation " sweet organic pineapples. Next, enjoy scenic countryside to the San Carlos Valley for a two night stay in Fortuna. Dinner.
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2 Two-nights
Day 4 CaĂąo Negro, Hot-Springs Cruise on the Rio Frio which runs through the world famous CaĂąo Negro Wildlife Refuge. Lunch. Return to Fortuna. Enjoy a relaxing soak in volcanic hot-springs. See majestic Arenal Volcano. Dinner. Day 5 Hanging Bridges Enjoy an unforgettable adventure in the heart of the rainforest at the Hanging Bridges. Hike on six suspension bridges, through the tropical rainforest canopy. Enjoy waterfall views and tropical birds. Scenic drive around Lake Arenal. Lunch. Enter Guanacaste Province.
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Caring for seeds is the same as caring for the earth –
it is for the benefit of future generations. Some have called Seed Savers Exchange the anti-Monsanto because the more than 20,000 varieties in our seed bank are in the public domain – they belong to you, to us, to everyone. Unlike genetically modified seed, our heirloom and openpollinated seeds can be saved and grown again, a link in a chain that goes back thousands of years. Seed Savers Exchange is a grass-roots, charitable organization that cares about our food system and how important biodiversity of life, and food, is. Find out how YOU can participate in our effort to create a more diverse food supply.
Request your free 2014 catalog by visiting www.seedsavers.org/onearth
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.org
volume 35
number 4
winter 2013/2014
our in-depth environmental coverage continues every weekday at onearth.org
4connect with us Get our newsletter onearth.org/newsletter On Facebook onearth.org/facebook On Twitter twitter.com/onearthmag On Tumblr onearth.tumblr.com
4meet the wr iter 4W E B E X C L U S I V E S What a Catch!
For three generations, Christopher Nicolson’s family has been fishing the waters of Bristol Bay. Now Nicolson is introducing his wild salmon to customers on the other side of the continent, in the heart of Brooklyn, as part of an effort to help keep Alaska’s waters sustainable for small fishermen and safe from a giant polluting mine project. onearth.org/freshcatch
She Lives in a Museum
When you move into a 300-plus-year-old farmhouse in New York City, life is bound to get interesting. Join MELISSA MAHONY as she learns what bridging city and rural life can teach us about sustainability. And ghosts. onearth.org/oldhouse
The Curse of Cute
Top left: corey arnold; RIGHT: ron haviv; far right: Jennifer Detar
Online videos of exotic animals often lead to the question: “How can I get one?” Bad idea. Research shows that viral videos could be fueling the illegal pet trade. onearth.org/toocute
4most po p ular
Why do we throw our stuff away instead of fixing it?
We’re no closer to saving bees—or our food supply
The property-rights case that could block the Keystone XL pipeline
The sound and the fury of Colorado’s deadly floods
Mom takes on poachers Sign up for email updates about our latest stories: onearth.org/newsletter
4COLUMNS AND BLOGS GLOBAL CURRENT
THE FUTURE OF FOOD
Love the underdog? Well, says GEORGE BLACK, people around the globe are taking on Goliath-like corporations in an effort to stop mines, dams, and coal export terminals—and winning! onearth.org/davidvgoliath
“Sell by” labels and expiration dates are confusing and meaningless. There are much better ways to determine if your food is safe to eat. JOCELYN C. ZUCKERMAN offers a menu of options. onearth.org/foodlabels
We like our writers to
have a range of experience, so a guy who has edited a fashion magazine, written for a wine-of-the-month club, and trapped boars for the National Park Service fits the bill. News blogger JASON BITTEL provides a lively take on the day’s environmental news in Today OnEarth (onearth.org/today) and introduces us to fascinating creatures in Species Watch (onearth.org/species). Follow him on Twitter: @bittelmethis OWNERSHIP STATEMENT Statement of ownership, management, and circulation (required by 39 U.S.C. 3685) of OnEarth, published quarterly and owned by the Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., President, Frances Beinecke; Editor, Douglas S. Barasch, 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011. Known bondholders, mortgages, and other security holders owning or holding one percent or more of the total amount of bonds, mortgages, and other securities: None. The purpose, function, and nonprofit status of this organization and the exempt status for federal income tax purposes have not changed during the preceding twelve months. The average number of copies printed of each issue during the preceding twelve months was: A. Total number of copies printed: 134,843. B. Paid and/or requested circulation: (1) Paid/ requested outside-county mail subscriptions stated on Form 3541: 129,020; (2) Paid in-county subscriptions: 0; (3) Sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors, counter sales, and other non-USPS paid distribution: 1,987; (4) Other classes mailed through the USPS: 0. C. Total paid and/or requested circulation: 131,007. D. Free distribution by mail: 1,320. (4) Free Distribution outside the mail: 0. E. Total Free Distribution: 1,320. F. Total Distribution: 132,327. G. Copies not distributed: 2,516. H. Total: 134,843. I certify that the statements made by me above are correct and complete. DOUGLAS S. BARASCH, Editor
Winter 2013/2014
onearth 5
contributors kristen french (“Aquifer Alert,” p. 46) has written about everything from Vladimir Nabokov to white-collar crooks to wind turbines—the latter for New York magazine. She has lived in the writer’s and journalist’s ghetto known as Brooklyn, New York, for more than a decade—an eternity for someone who’s a nomad at heart. Marco di Lauro (“A World Away,” p. 48) is a Romebased photojournalist whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Time, and the Guardian. A two-time winner of the World Press Photo contest, Di Lauro has been featured in group and solo exhibitions in Italy, England, France, and the United States.
Clarissa Bonet (“Generation Toxic,” p. 28) is a photographer based in Chicago whose work has been exhibited in New York, Paris, and Tel Aviv and is in the collection of the Museum of Contemporary Photography. She is a 2013 winner of the Magenta Foundation’s Flash Forward competition for emerging photographers.
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.
Clarissa Bonet: Luis Bueno; Marco Di Lauro: Gian-Reto Gredig
florence williams (“Generation Toxic,” p. 28) writes about health and the environment from her home in Washington, D.C. Her book Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History (W. W. Norton) won the 2013 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Science & Technology and was named a Notable Book of 2012 by the New York Times.
Take Charge of Your Health!
W
ant to take health care into your own hands? Steer clear of hospitals and doctors’ offices? Cut back on over-the-counter and
prescription drugs and find milder, more natural ways to get well? Then this is the book for you. Tieraona Low Dog, M.D., integrative physician and expert in natural medicine, has collected her favorite remedies and recipes—tried and true, for children and adults, the ones she has used in her own home over the years—and shares them, along with wise, practical advice on when to call the doctor and when to stay put and use your own resources to get healthy at home. “I can think of no one better qualified to guide [readers] to health, healing, and wholeness.” —Andrew Weil, M.D.
“A must-read for anyone who cares about optimal health.”
LIFE
Also available from National Geographic
IS
YOUR BEST
MEDICINE
A Woman’s Guide to Health, Healing, and Wholeness at Every Age FOREWORD BY
ANDREW WEIL, M.D.
AVAILABLE WHEREVER BOOKS ARE SOLD nationalgeographic.com/books
Like us on Facebook.com: Nat Geo Books
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© 2013 National Geographic Society
JOE & TERRY GRAEDON OF THE PEOPLE’S PHARMACY
editor’s letter chemicals that imperil a generation
I
was in San Francisco a few months ago talking to Miriam Rotkin-Ellman,
Douglas S. barasch
8 onearth
winter 2013/2014
Jeff weiner
a public health expert at NRDC, when she said something I could barely wrap my head around. Several categories of neurotoxicants in the environment—those present in vehicle exhaust, flame retardants (found in clothing, furniture, and home electronics), and pesticides (used in the home and on produce we ingest)—could create a public health crisis comparable to that caused by lead during the last century. These chemicals, despite their complicated names—polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAH; polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs; and organophosphates—are pervasive in our environment and affect millions of Americans. Most alarmingly, scientists are beginning to grasp their dramatic impact on the developing brains of fetuses and children. We like to believe that if we’re wellinformed and cautious, we and our “As many as one in six children loved ones will be relatively safe from nationwide has a neurodevelopmental such threats. If only. Nineteen percent of Americans live near high-volume disability, including autism, speech and roads, a significant source of PAH, but language delays, and ADHD” even if you don’t, you can be exposed to toxic levels of PAH while waiting to pick up your children in their school’s parking lot, where cars and diesel-fueled buses idle. Thanks in part to chemicals like these, Florence Williams reports, “as many as one in six children nationwide has a neurodevelopmental disability, including autism, speech and language delays, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.” What’s more, she writes, several studies have shown that “higher prenatal exposure [to PAH] corresponded to an average 3.8-point drop in IQ in 5-year-olds. This drop is comparable to the effects of lead, the discovery of which, in the 1970s, eventually triggered a massive public health response.” How much could a few IQ points matter? “An average drop of five IQ points in the United States,” Williams reports, “translates into 2.4 million gifted kids instead of 6 million, and 9.4 million mentally retarded children instead of 6 million.” So yes, this is a real public health crisis. Williams does offer glimmers of hope. She meets with a number of brilliant researchers devoting their professional lives to gaining a better understanding of the science behind these chemicals and their effects. This research could eventually benefit us all—perhaps in the form of more government safeguards. Some of the implicated chemicals have been or are being phased out—which counts as at least modest progress. Another NRDC scientist, Linda Greer, director of the health and environment program, describes herself as a woman with “a Ph.D. in environmental toxicology and more than 20 years of work experience,” yet she tells us, “I don’t feel I know enough to protect myself and my family through screening what we buy. For that reason, we really need the government to be the cop on the beat.” Indeed, our cover story urgently reminds us that most environmental issues are neither abstract nor far removed from everyday life; they’re ultimately about our health and well-being.
view from NRDC The U.S. can become a 100-Percent clean energy nation over the past 40 years? Here are some hints: it’s not coal, not oil, not natural gas, not nuclear power. Give up? The answer: efficiency. Americans have found so many innovative ways to save energy that we have more than doubled the economic productivity we get out of the fuels we do use. Indeed, efficiency has done more to meet our energy needs than oil, gas, and nuclear combined. The United States achieved these savings in part because NRDC has made advocating for efficiency the centerpiece of our energy strategy for more than three decades. This quiet energy revolution has vast potential. We have enormous reserves of efficiency still waiting to be tapped—not to mention huge stores of wind, geothermal, and solar energy. Indeed, the United States has enough resources to rely on 100 percent clean energy, and NRDC is committed to reaching that goal. But we can’t build this sustainable future if we insist on using the fossil fuels of the past. Fracking for gas in people’s backyards, dynamiting mountains in Appalachia for coal, strip-mining Alberta’s boreal wilderness to dig up tar sands—all scar the landscape and leave toxic We have enormous reserves remnants. All culminate in burnof energy efficiency still waiting to be ing fossil fuels that wreak havoc on the planet, releasing the globaltapped—not to mention huge stores of warming emissions that lead to wind, geothermal, and solar energy extreme storms, drought, and heat waves, as well as the pollution that contributes to respiratory illness, heart disease, and cancer. We don’t have to continue down this road, creating a grim legacy for our children. Instead, we can become a clean energy nation. How? First, demand that your elected officials say no to the dirtiest fossil fuels threatening our communities—no to power plants that fail to control their carbon pollution; no to destructive fracking operations and coal mining; no to the Keystone XL pipeline that would carry dirty tar sands oil through the American heartland to the Gulf of Mexico for export to other countries. And second, demand that your elected officials say yes to measures that encourage clean energy—like the policies that have enabled Iowa, South Dakota, and Kansas to get roughly 20 percent of their electricity from wind. Or the Obama administration’s proposed carbon limits for power plants. Or the fuel economy standards that will require new cars to get 54.5 miles per gallon on average by 2025—and save consumers $1.7 trillion at the gas pump. You can add your voice to the chorus by going to our new site, DemandCleanPower.org. There you can take action and hear from NRDC trustees Robert Redford and Van Jones, as well as NRDC friends, including Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Carole King, and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who are standing up for a sustainable energy future. Together we can get America on track to become a 100-percent clean energy nation.
francEs beinecke, President
1 0 onearth
Winter 2013/2014
Matt Greenslade/photo-nyc.com
C
an you guess what our LARGEST SINGLE source of energy haS BEEN
Create Your Own Lasting Legacy
Photo: Š Joseph Van Os
You can create a lasting environmental legacy by including NRDC in your estate plans. A gift through your will, trust, retirement plan or life insurance plan will help preserve our magnificent natural heritage for generations to come.
For information on how to include NRDC in your estate plans or to let us know you’ve already done so, please contact Michelle Quinones, Lead Specialist, Gift Planning, at 212-727-4552 or email her at legacygifts@nrdc.org See the back cover to learn about the Legacy Challenge! www.nrdc.org/legacygift
the deans list
by bob deans
The fertile marshes, broad tion and leaving the coast vulnerable to the action of waves tidal flats, and sweeping barrier and currents, which is further eroding the wetlands. This islands of coastal Louisiana provide industry has broken faith with the people of Louisiana. Louisiana has provided a stable and profitable base of essential habitat to waterfowl by the millions and serve as a nursery operations for the oil and gas industry, which has drawn for the bounty of fish, shrimp, oys- roughly $470 billion worth of fuel (based on national price ters, and crabs along the skirt of averages) from the state’s lands and waters over just the the Gulf of Mexico. Home to bald past two decades. In return, the industry has broken its cypress, wax myrtle, and black promises and flouted the law. Finally fed up, the Southeast Louisiana Flood Protecmangrove, the region is a natural tion Authority–East, charged with protecting part of wonder—and a national treasure. To the people of south Louisiana, this rich tapestry of New Orleans against the kind of flood that devastated wetlands also provides a natural buffer and the first line of the city when Hurricane Katrina struck in 2005, is insistdefense against the greatest threats they face: storm surges ing that the companies that have profited so richly from and catastrophic flooding from hurricanes. The protective the state’s natural resources be required to repair the coast, however, is fast disappearing. Over the past eight damage they have done to its coastal lands. In July, the authordecades, Louisiana ity filed a lawsuit in has lost enough To the people of south Louisiana, the Parish of Orleans coastal lands to a rich tapestry of wetlands provides Civil District Court, almost cover the a natural buffer against the greatest asserting that the acstate of Delaware, tions of BP, Chevron, and it continues to threats they face: storm surges and Exxon/Mobil, Shell, lose about an acre flooding from hurricanes and 93 other oil and every hour, among gas companies have the highest rates of made it more difficult, and more costly, to protect the city wetlands loss anywhere in the world. There are several reasons for this unfolding disaster. and its people from flooding. This industry isn’t responsible Sea level is rising as a result of climate change. Because for all of Louisiana’s wetlands loss, and nobody claims it is. the Mississippi River is held in place by levees to protect The suit merely asks that the oil, gas, and pipeline companies development and shipping, natural sediments that would pay their fair share to repair the damaged coast, just as the otherwise replenish the wetlands are forced toward the companies promised and the law requires. Asking the court to rule on this matter seems only fair. mouth of the river. And these lands are subsiding—literally sinking into the sea—largely because decades of oil and gas If Louisiana’s coast is to survive, the people of the state extraction have hollowed out vast areas deep underground. must insist that the industry that has gained so much from At the same time, the oil and gas industry has sliced Loui- Louisiana’s resources be held to account. If this lawsuit siana’s coastal lands to ribbons, dredging out irreplaceable succeeds, the case could become a landmark, setting a wetlands to create roughly 10,000 miles of cuts for pipelines precedent for environmental protection in a state that has and navigation canals that shorten shipping routes to off- already paid too high a price to feed our national addiction shore platforms and drilling rigs. Before sinking a shovel, to oil and gas. the oil and gas companies promised to refill, revegetate, and restore these wetlands under the terms of state and Bob Deans, NRDC’s associate director of communications, is a federal laws, regulations, and permitting requirements. veteran newspaper reporter and a former president of the White That hasn’t happened. Instead, these cuts have opened House Correspondents’ Association. His most recent book is Reckless: the coastal lands to saltwater intrusion, killing off vegeta- The Political Assault on the American Environment.
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illustration by bruce morser
A fight to save Louisiana’s coast
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where onearth chromatic scales The Great Barrier Reef plays host to 1,500 species of riotously colorful fish.
S
Grab a snorkel and flippers and behold the Great Barrier Reef By caitlin barasch
panning more than 1,400 miles and containing some 3,000
separate and unique coral reefs, the Great Barrier Reef—as I was reminded by my snorkeling-tour guide—is one of the world’s only natural wonders visible from outer space. That’s all well and good, but experiencing this wonder off Australia’s Queensland coast is better when it’s right in front of you. The first thing I was struck by was the water’s Technicolor-worthy shade of aqua. Even from above the surface, the reef was easy to delineate. Once I took the plunge, I found myself hovering over a jungle gym of dazzling coral. Schools of tiny fish flitted past my outstretched fingers, while bigger ones—done up in flashy purples, greens, reds, and pinks—poked in and out of holes and gaps. A grumpy barracuda, the object of some scuba divers’ friendly pursuit, passed by my left flipper. In perfect quietude I swam through tunnels and peeked over the edges of coral cliffs. Because it requires sunlight to grow, the reef sits surprisingly close to the surface. But as I swam toward the darkening waters along its edges, I suddenly realized that I was flanked by unimaginable depths. While the reef itself has an average depth of only 114 feet, the average depth of the Coral Sea around it is 7,850 feet. In the end, that realization helped me decide I was ready to return to the boat. I retreated from the blurry darkness at the reef’s edge, telling myself as I swam off to think more about all the beautiful, colorful things I’d just seen and less about the abyss that was much harder to see, but not at all difficult to sense.
sos
Coral Imperative Coral reefs provide a valuable service not only to various forms of marine life but also to human communities, by acting as natural coastal barriers against giant waves and storm surges. Alas, they’re especially vulnerable to the rising sea temperatures and ocean acidification associated with climate change. As severe weather events increase in frequency and intensity, the protection that reefs offer us becomes even more critical. In 2012 the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (gbrmpa.gov.au) published its Great Barrier Reef Climate Change Adaptation Strategy and Action Plan 2012-2017. The report outlines Australia’s multifaceted effort to preserve one of our planet’s most valuable ecosystems by, among other things, encouraging both industry and coastal communities to work with scientists in order to maximize the reef’s natural resiliency.
Bungee Jump off the 164-foot AJ Hackett Tower in Cairns, with gorgeous views of the ocean all the way down (and back up). ajhackett.com/cairns Party (and maybe even get some sleep) along with other thrillseekers at the dorm-style Gilligan’s Backpackers Hotel in Cairns. gilligans.com.au Cool off under the rainforest waterfalls of the Crystal Cascades, just a 20-minute drive northeast of Cairns, near the suburb of Redlynch. 1 4 onearth
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NORBERT WU/ MINDEN PICTURES/National Geographic Creative
floating above it all
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winter 2013/2014
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
breaking it all down for us
B illustration by Otto Steininger; STATISTICS: gwe biogas
by elizabeth royte
Anaerobic digestion enlists microbes to gobble up the organic waste that typically goes into landfills. Could it also turn our rotten melons into fresh megawatts?
neighbors Vermont and Connecticut in requiring that large amounts of organic waste go somewhere other than landfills. (New York City garbage trucks in Massachusetts might smell a little mayor Michael Bloomberg has expressed his wish to enact a similar less putrid than usual, thanks to a new regulation requirement before he leaves office at the beginning of next year.) that would prohibit any generator of more than a Should these regulations have their intended effect, the Northeast ton of food scraps per week from hauling those will likely see a major surge in the technology of scraps to the dump. As the state anaerobic digestion (AD). finally gets serious about divertFor more about waste and reuse, The AD process starts when organic material is ing food waste, it expects to be read Elizabeth Royte’s column at dumped into an enclosed tank and seeded with hunsending much of it elsewhere: to onearth.org/upstreamanddown gry bacteria. As microbes devour this nutrient-rich hungry people, animal-feed producers, commercial material, they produce sugars, fatty acids, and amino acids. Successive composters, and the high-tech contraptions known as anaerobic waves of bacteria then convert these products into carbon dioxide, digesters, which convert waste to energy and fertilizer. hydrogen, ammonia, organic acids, and methane. The biogases With the passage of the new regulation, Massachusetts will join its eginning next summer, landfill-bound
50k
.org
tons of food waste digested anaerobically each year by GWE Biogas, a U.K. facility
2.1
megawatts of energy generated per 50k tons of food waste
3.2k
estimated number of homes that could be powered by 2.1 mW of energy
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good finds
winged victory
R
oll over, Icarus, and tell Charles
“
Sounding Board Though it looks like a place to store your carving knife, this wood block is actually a speaker that bounces sound waves around within its chamber—sans power—to play what comes out of your iPad or iPhone. $85, at houdsound.com
Anaerobically digesting 50 percent of the food Americans waste could power 2.5 million homes
”
says Patrick Serfass, executive director of the American Biogas Council. “We can recycle the organic waste that makes up 20 to 40 percent of our garbage and turn it into renewable energy.” Digesting 50 percent of the food Americans waste, says the Environmental Protection Agency, would generate enough electricity to power 2.5 million homes. Some worry that government subsidies could create an oversize AD industry with an insatiable appetite for food. Already there is concern in the European Union, where subsidies are a powerful incentive, about the possibility that crops will be grown solely for AD purposes. Others caution that centralized industrial digestion could undermine community composting operations, which not only produce valuable fertilizer for local gardeners and landscapers but also “foster community engagement and commitment to sustainable practices,” according to David Buckel, a New York–based community composting consultant. “We need both scales. But we should do as much local composting as possible.” However the options shake out, it’s clear that the days of long-hauling massive amounts of methanegenerating organics to landfills are numbered. Let the food fight—over the energy and nutrients stored in peanut shells and potato peels—begin. Elizabeth Royte is a contributing editor to OnEarth.
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Lindbergh the news. Over the summer, a uniquely engineered flying machine made its first transcontinental flight, from San Francisco to New York City. With a wingspan that rivals that of a 747—yet weighing about as much as a Subaru Outback—the HB-SIA required a few layovers to complete its 3,500-mile trip. One thing it didn’t require, however: a single drop of fuel. The HB-SIA is the brainchild of Solar Impulse, a collaboration between a pair of Swiss businessmen and one of their country’s top technical universities. Since commissioning a feasibility study a decade ago, Solar Impulse has dedicated itself to the commercialization of solar-powered flight. The HB-SIA has already broken records for manned, solar-powered aircraft. Now admirers like Richard Branson and James Cameron are signing up as backers, hoping to be a part of aviation history: the company plans to fly its updated solar-powered plane around the —KRISTEN FRENCH world in 2015.
saving soles One of the main contributors to Indian Ocean pollution? Discarded flip-flops. Now a Nairobi-based company, Ocean Sole, is collecting up to 150,000 of them a year. Craftspeople convert them into colorful toys and sculptures in an effort that provides jobs as it helps clean the coast. ocean-sole.com
bijoux and Beyond
I
n crafting her small, shining
objects, Jes MaHarry infuses conventional materials with unconventional spirit. MaHarry’s jewelry reflects the Ojai, California–based artist’s immersion in nature, as does her commitment to sourcing only from providers who use reclaimed or recycled metals and her dedication to environmental causes, to which she donates a share of her profits. jesmaharry.com
illustration by pete ryan; right: photograph for onearth by Brian Fitzgerald
generated by the process can be captured and used to produce fuel, electricity, and heat; left behind are crumbly dregs known as digestate, which has some value as fertilizer. Across the United States, nearly 200 farms and a handful of industrial food-service operators already use small AD systems to turn slurries of animal waste or food scraps into power. Wastewater treatment plants, of course, have long enlisted microbes to digest the organic solids in human sewage, but increasingly they have been using AD technology to generate their own energy and offset electricity costs. To further boost power production, plants with excess digester capacity are starting to chase food scraps—which generate 10 to 35 times more gas than does animal or human waste. “This is a great opportunity for economic growth,”
2013. During his first term, Portland Pipe Line applied for a permit that would allow it to reverse the flow of its pipelines and—via an arrangement with Enbridge, the Canadian oil infrastructure giant—begin carrying Canadian tar sands oil into this community of 25,000 people. The company also requested a permit to build smokestacks in Bug Light Park, a picturesque slice of coastal
his city limits
Mayor Tom Blake welcomes tourists, not tar sands, to his waterfront.
“
lution that says South Portland will do whatever we can to reduce our footprint on the planet—and promoting a new form of extraction, especially one as damaging as tar sands mining in Alberta, increases our footprint. Number two is transportation. Sending the dirtiest oil on earth through our community violates what I consider to be good health and safety standards for South Portland. Number three
Portland Pipe Line brags about its track record, but a single tar sands spill in South Portland would destroy this community
rocky reception When a pipeline company fought to bring tar sands oil into scenic South Portland, Maine, city hall fought back Tom Blake grew up next to
an oil tank. The holding containers owned by various oil companies were so much a par t of the Casco Bay waterfront of his South Portland, Maine, youth that in 1970, when he ran for mock city council in high school, Ted Genoways his proposals included persuading the talks to Portland Pipe Line Corp. to paint its TOM BLAKE tanks green and plant pine trees to hide them from public view. Later Blake joined the South Portland Fire Department, where his responsibilities included inspecting Portland Pipe Line’s main operations once a year and inspecting oil tankers as they arrived in port for off-loading once a day. He came to understand that the local tank farm was more than an eyesore. Today the 100-acre expanse of oil tanks holds some 3.5 million barrels of refined crude, carried in from the Gulf Coast and international refineries. Two pipelines then pump the oil across southern Maine, over the mountains of New Hampshire and Vermont, and under the St. Lawrence River into Montreal. South Portland’s mayors are appointed to one-year terms by members of the city council from within their own ranks. Blake, who was appointed mayor for the first time in 2008, began his second term in early
New England that’s one of South Portland’s biggest tourist attractions. Blake opposes both efforts. We spoke recently at his Casco Bay home—just weeks before an election that could decide the fate of his job and his city’s energy future. How did you learn of Portland Pipe Line’s plan to bring tar sands oil here?
It kind of went under the radar. In fact, when the company applied for its first permit in 2008, there wasn’t a single person that spoke at the planning board against it. Portland Pipe Line received a permit, and then they received a one-year renewal. In 2009 America wasn’t awake to the dangers of tar sands. It was the 2010 Enbridge spill in Kalamazoo [Michigan] that woke everybody up. A million gallons into the river there—and it was this new tar sands product. We started taking a closer look at Enbridge, and what this pipeline would be carrying. What makes tar sands oil different from the oil that has always come through South Portland?
The problems with tar sands are threefold. Number one is extraction. We have a sustainability reso-
”
is emissions. South Portland has signed on to the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ Climate Protection Agreement, which commits our city to enact policies that meet or beat the targets suggested in the Kyoto Protocol. Building smokestacks would obviously worsen the air that our children have to breathe. This is about those kids, and their kids. So you organized a public hearing.
On March 11, each side—Portland Pipe Line and the Natural Resources Council of Maine—was given a half hour to present. Then we opened up the floor to public comment. We had 450 people in attendance, and 65 spoke. Afterward, the council started exploring our next steps: ordinance changes and pressuring our state representatives to ask the president for a national impact study. Then, in April, my wife and I went to Arkansas on vacation, to go hiking in the Ozarks. Every morning we would see local headlines about the Exxon oil spill in Mayflower. And the more I read, the more I thought: This is South Portland. That pipeline was so similar to the Portland pipeline— similar ages, similar functions,
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with him, but I did. I told him: “You could become a leader in America. You could have one of the most liberal towns in America love you, because you converted all your resources into clean energy.” I painted a picture of what each of their properties could become, what their business could look like 50 years down the road. “You’ll have to change your name and your whole way of thinking,” I said. “But eventually you’re going to phase into clean energies, and people will support you.”
similar reversals. And every article detailed a different angle: how the spill had impacted fisheries, drinking water, tourism. Portland Pipe Line brags about its track record, but a single tar sands spill in South Portland would destroy this community. Not only the soil and bay and drinking water, but our economy, our tourism—our whole future. When I got back, I caught wind of a citizens’ initiative, a petition to propose what is now being called the Waterfront Protection Ordinance.
Did he show any interest in the vision you outlined for him?
He said, “I don’t care about the future. All I care about is 35 jobs today.” That was his answer. Portland Pipe Line has 35 employees; only one of them lives in South Portland. But even if it were 3,000 jobs, what good are I felt like I’d be denying my own jobs if you can’t breathe the air, beliefs if I didn’t add my name. or drink the water, or work the There’s been backlash from both soil? Unfortunately, he has joined sides: some say I’ve drunk the with others to create a coalition left-wing Kool-Aid, some ask why of petroleum-related interests on the waterfront. we didn’t just They’re charpass an ordiFind Ted Genoways in conversaacterizing the nance as a city tion with other newsmakers at ordinance as council. To the onearth.org/tedqas anti-business. first group I say, just because you’re an elected They’re saying it’s going to shut official doesn’t take away your down commerce on the waterresponsibility to take a stand. front, lose us jobs, decrease our To the second group I say that property values. I think just the opposite is true. something this substantial needs to go to the voters. The Water- We can create more jobs. It’s gofront Protection Ordinance calls ing to make a more vibrant, verfor restricting “further growth satile waterfront. With cleaner or expansion” of the petroleum energies, our property values industry. It allows the industry will increase. In November, the to continue operating as it does ordinance comes to a vote, and so long as it meets new federal voters will get to decide on it, and regulations, but it prohibits de- they’ll also get to decide who they velopment. My feeling is, let’s let want as mayor of South Portland. And that’s the best thing, in my 25,000 people talk about it. opinion. Let the citizens decide. You made a major statement by appearing before city hall to receive the petition, and then you and your wife added your signatures. You signed while holding your granddaughter in your arms.
.org
How did Portland Pipe Line react?
After the petition was submitted, Larry Wilson, the CEO, reached out to try to talk to all the city councilors one-on-one. Several of the councilors wouldn’t talk 2 0 onearth
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On November 5, voters re-elected Tom Blake to his city council seat. The Waterfront Protection Ordinance was defeated by a margin of 192 votes out of 8,714 cast.
fish food for thought
S
ome higher life forms find that doing sudoku or
crossword puzzles helps them stay mentally nimble. Now scientists are beginning to think that a bit of entertaining, brain-stimulating “play” each day can sharpen the minds of fish and help them focus on their work: eating, reproducing, and avoiding predators. In a study at Norway’s University of Bergen, hatchery-raised salmon whose tanks had been tricked out with pebbles, cobbles, and plastic fronds appeared to be markedly, well, smarter than salmon that had spent their days in plain, undecorated tanks. Researchers believe the decorations foster a useful survival skill by breaking up water currents and providing obstacles that the fish must negotiate—an activity that serves these fish well when they’re released into rivers, where water currents are highly dynamic and natural obstacles abound. By contrast, in the undecorated tanks, where the current flowed only one way, the salmon just swam around in endless circles. To test salmon IQ, researchers sent fish from two groups through a maze. Those from the furnished tanks made fewer mistakes along their route and found their way out more quickly than those from the unfurnished tanks. (One poor guy from the latter group swam into the same dead end 15 times in a row.) Researchers also looked inside some of the fishes’ heads— literally—and found that the brains of salmon with playground privileges displayed increased development and plasticity. Anne Gro Vea Salvanes, who led the study, hopes conservation hatcheries will put her team’s findings to good use. While the industry has noted these findings with interest, hatcheries have hesitated to furnish their fish tanks, citing labor and maintenance costs. Acknowledging such barriers, Salvanes and her colleagues are working to develop a set of fun, pedagogically approved, “easy-to-install, easy-to-maintain” fish-tank equipment: the piscine equivalent of the educational toys you might find in an elementary school gifted-and-talented program. We —fangfei shen always knew our little Nemo was special!
Illustration by Thomas fuchs; Right: photograph for onearth by Keith Lanpher
F RONTLINES
brother of pearl
The 17-year-old has watched over, nurtured, and planted roughly 5,000 oysters since 2008.
coming out of his shell David Lewis’s after-school job is saving the Chesapeake Bay, one baby oyster at a time
W
By jeff turrentine
hen you’re raising a budding ocean
scientist, you have to be prepared to make some sacrifices. For the family of 17-yearold David Lewis of Yorktown, Virginia, one appreciable sacrifice has been the kitchen counter space that once was available for sandwich-making or vegetable-slicing but is now taken up by a 20gallon glass aquarium inhabited by a colony of spiny, green, contentedly indolent sea urchins. As he proudly shows them to a visitor, Lewis explains that he’s been testing the effects of temperature on sea urchins’ ability to flip over and right themselves when they fall off the side of the tank, where they like to congregate. But in truth it’s another species of aquatic organism that has most captured the fancy of this Eagle Scout and high school senior. A short walk through his family’s suburban backyard ends at a wooden boat slip on Lambs Creek, a gently rolling tributary of the 12-mile-long Poquoson River, which flows out to the Chesapeake Bay. Lewis guides his visitor to the edge of the slip and pulls at a rope
“
he has secured to a piling. Up comes a homemade float crafted from metal wire and PVC pipe, about the size of a mid-range flat-screen TV. Its bottom is pockmarked with barnacles; nestled in its basin—along with a few guppies and one rather startled crab—is a rectangular mesh bag. Inside the bag are roughly 1,000 Eastern oysters. Lewis is now in his fifth year as a volunteer oyster gardener, a responsibility he first assumed as a 13-year-old Boy Scout in search of his next merit badge. Near the end of each summer, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation sends him home with a shipment of baby bivalves— each no bigger than a fingernail—which he then spends the better part of a year tending. Once these oysters have had a chance to grow up a little under Lewis’s watchful eye, he and CBF members deliver them to a state-protected sanctuary reef in the bay. Thanks to their year of being cared for, they’re healthier and sturdier than juveniles that were placed on reefs directly from hatcheries. As he frees the oysters from their bag and gives it a good scrubbing, Lewis explains why he doesn’t mind removing caked-on oyster excreta from wire mesh when he could be playing video games. “An adult oyster is capable of filtering 50 gallons of water per day,” he says. As water flows
As 50 gallons of water per day flows through their shells, oysters operate as highly efficient filters
”
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What it’s called: How to Cook Everything Vegetarian Compatible with: iOS What it does: The app “version” of the seminal vegetarian cookbook by New York Times food writer Mark Bittman contains more than 2,000 recipes and features enhanced search capabilities, customizable shopping lists, recipe timers, and more. How much it costs: $9.99 SPOTLIGHT Set in a future where big cities have become work camps and fresh food is a luxury item, Changrae Lee’s novel On Such a Full Sea (Riverhead, January 7) tells of a woman who escapes her life as a fish-tank diver to find her missing lover.
they do it with mirrors
T
He same high mountains that surround the Norwegian village of Rjukan and lend the place its storybook charm also have the unfortunate tendency to block out the sun for nearly half the year. But last summer, longbenighted villagers took a bright idea for illuminating their town square year-round and set it in stone: they installed a solspeil, a system of giant mirrors that take up a combined 550 square feet, atop the big cliffs looming over their little hamlet. Adjustments are made throughout the day, via computer, to angle the mirrors in such a way that they’re always reflecting as much sunlight downward as possible. There’s no word yet on plans to introduce palm trees or swimming pools to Rjukan, though surely they —K.F. can’t be too far behind.
cutting carbon calories 7.0_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________
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CHINA
USA
GLOBAL FOOD WASTE
RUSSIA
INDIA
JAPAN
According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture
Organization, one-third of all food produced globally—1.3 billion tons of it—goes to waste each year. All that uneaten food generates 3.3 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas annually, putting it in the emissions big leagues along with major industries and even entire nations. If global food waste were a country, here’s how it would compare with some of its neighbors with high populations and heavy carbon footprints. —F.S.
statistics: food and agriculture organization of the united nations; left: AlenKadr/shutterstock; Above: Meek, Tore/AP/Corbis
through their slightly opened shells— and with it plankton, sediment, and algae-generating nitrogen—oysters, he notes, operate as highly efficient strainers for their habitats. But because of overharvesting, pollution, and disease, oysters have almost disappeared from the Chesapeake Bay. Today their population hovers between 1 percent and 2 percent of historical levels. “Back in the 1600s, when John Smith came over to colonize the East Coast, he actually got his boat stuck,” says Lewis. “There were so many oysters that he was scraping the bottom of his hull.” In an effort to replenish the waters, the Chesapeake Bay Foundation and other groups have planted hundreds of millions of oysters onto 1,500 acres of oyster reefs since 2001. In addition to performing routine cleaning and maintenance, Lewis must keep an eye out for hungry crabs, check for signs of disease or parasites, and, in the event of hurricanes or major storms, move his oysters to safety. (“They do just fine in the garage under a wet towel for a couple of days,” he says.) He also conducts experiments. In one, he learned that when aqueous pH levels drop—most typically as the result of acidification brought on by CO2 absorption—“it definitely lowers filtering rates. Ocean acidification is right up there with overharvesting” as an obstacle to oysters’ long-term recovery, he says. When Lewis heads off to college next year, he hopes to study biology with a focus on marine science. By his first day of class he’ll be able to say that he has already fosterparented more than 5,000 oysters: protecting them, nurturing them, ushering them into adulthood. But never naming them. “Some other oyster gardeners do that,” Lewis says, grinning at the suggestion. “I don’t.” On the other hand, he says, “I don’t eat them, either.”
APPROPOS
GhG Emissions in billions of metric tons
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onearth 23
the synthesist
by kim tingley
“After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival,” wrote the biologist Janine Benyus in her seminal 1997 book, Biomimicry. Benyus thinks fractals can help us solve a diverse array of design challenges. For one thing, “fractals really increase surface area,” she says. Picture a simple hexagon. Then picture a hexagonal snowflake crystal, within its form a baroque system of ridges that greatly complicates the basic shape without causing it to expand beyond its original boundaries. Cell phone makers, playing off this idea, have already figured out new ways of maximizing signal reception by bending antennas into fractal shapes, adding length without increasing the amount of space they take up. Acousticians and concert-hall architects already know that when sound hits a smooth, flat wall, it bounces off and echoes. A wall with a rough surface, on the other hand—one that mimics the fractally textured surface of, say, a bark-covered tree—does a much better job of absorbing sound. Trees are like fractal idea factories: Benyus sees in them a template for highly efficient water distribution, for example. “Start with one diameter” (i.e., the trunk), she says. “Branch it, drop down to a smaller diameter, then branch it again.” This pattern, which repeatedly finds expression in a tree’s branches, its stems, and the delicate veins of its individual leaves, allows water to flow freely over a maximum amount of surface area. “Nothing in our plumbing systems looks anything like that,” she says, noting that our pipes “are always taking 90-degree angles. That’s why we have big pumps that require lots of energy.” It turns out that strategically embedding fractal shapes into almost anything helps make that thing stronger. Physicists have made concrete more durable and impermeable by using fractals to engineer its lassical geometry is smooth and ingredients. Researchers at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for regular: straight lines, right angles, perfect circles. Man-made objects, from skyscrapers to iPhones, Biologically Inspired Engineering recently created a biodegradable alternative to plastic known as shrilk, which owes some of its excepconform to its rules, but almost nothing in nature does. Nature is messy, craggy, and chaotic—or so it tional strength to the inspiration for its engineering: the fractal layers seemed until 1975, the year a maverick mathemati- of an insect’s cuticle. “[Many of] the structural properties found in cian, Benoît Mandelbrot, invented the term fractals nature are not just chemistry,” Donald Ingber, the institute’s director, to describe patterns he had discerned within seemingly irregular told the Harvard Gazette. “They’re architecture.” Finding inspiration in nature isn’t new, of course. But actively queryshapes found in nature. Mandelbrot showed that natural phenomena ing nature about its best practices is. The trickiest part of biomimicry is like clouds, mountains, broccoli, human lungs, and (yes) even galaxies in knowing not only what to copy, but also when and where. If we really are, despite their random appearance, highly organized, their larger forms composed of miniature replicas of those same forms. And those hope to collaborate with nature on new building and design projects, we’ll need to rethink our role within it. We’ll have to make replicas themselves contain even smaller replicas. At sure we’re balancing our needs with the needs of our the most fundamental level, he showed that each foot For more on the intersection of larger ecosystem, which—while it may look messy—is of coastline has the same basic jagged texture and science, culture, and the environactually made up of countless interconnected systems shape as a mile of it does, or as 100 miles do. ment, visit onearth.org/scitech that, fractal-like, mirror the whole. Mandelbrot’s revelation presented a new way of Fractals invite us to admire nature for its beauty and functionality— perceiving nature, not as something disordered and chance-governed to get outside, hunt for these mysteriously repeating forms, and then but as something intricately engineered. The resultant field of fractal geometry provides us with a way of defining and measuring these mys- try to figure out what their purpose might be. “The nature of fractals is meant to be gradually discovered by the reader,” Mandelbrot wrote, terious forms and—when it’s applied to the field of biomimicry—re“not revealed in a flash by the author.” It takes practice, patience, and imcreating them. And our newfound ability to copy nature’s fundamental mersion to start seeing them. But once you do, they’re everywhere. designs raises an obvious question: Why don’t we do so more often? This question is at the heart of biomimicry, which seeks to appropriate nature’s most successful designs in order to create more Kim Tingley, a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, writes the efficient and sustainable cities, buildings, and consumer products. Working Hypothesis column for onearth.org.
design for living
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illustration by jesse lefkowitz
.org
repeat when necessary
W
by elizabeth Kolbert
hen I was a kid, my father
used to pad around the house, silently, turning out the lights.
In his wraith-like wanderings he would occasionally click off lights in rooms that were occupied. Someone—me, my brother, or my mother— would squeal at him out of the dimness, and reluctantly he would turn them back on. Our house was not only dark; it was also wintery. When less cold-adapted friends or relations came
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for a visit, my father would turn up the thermostat. Once they left, down it went again. If anyone in the immediate family complained about this, his advice was simple: “Put on a sweater.”) My father is, let’s just say, frugal, and his campaign to keep the lights off and the thermostat low was motivated primarily by energy costs. (This was the 1970s, when even the president—infamously—donned a cardigan to make a similar point.) But as my father now likes to say, he was ahead of his time. Most experts agree that, in the near term at least, energy conservation is the single most effective way for the United States to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions. “That’s where everybody who has really thought about the problem thinks the biggest gains can be and should be,” is how former energy secretary Steven Chu put it a couple of years ago. (In the same interview, Chu described energy conservation as “sexy”—which, I think, is further even than my father is willing to go.) A recent report by the International Energy Agency that looked at 11 industrialized nations—including the United States—found that investments in energy efficiency amount to less than two-thirds of the money spent on fossil fuel subsidies. Nevertheless, in 2010, the energy use avoided through efficiency measures was larger than the energy provided by burning oil. Of course, another way of describing my father is to say he’s a throwback. For most of human history, people heated their homes sparingly, if at all. Sources of heat such as wood, peat, and eventually coal were hard to come by, so everyone wore sweaters or their equivalents—if, that is, they were fortunate enough to have them. Light was even dearer: in colonial America, candles were usually made of animal fat, and producing them was time-consuming and difficult. (They tended to crack, melt, or—worse still—rot.) In May 1743, the Reverend Edward Holyoke, who at the time was president of Harvard, recorded in his diary that his household had produced 78 pounds of candles. In the fall of that same year, he noted laconically: “Candles all gone.” Though the conditions of life in the United States have changed rather dramatically since then—few Americans today have to worry that their light will be “all gone”—conserving energy makes just as much sense now as it did in the 1740s (or the 1970s, for that matter). Indeed, in an age haunted by global warming, ocean acidification, and the myriad dangers posed by fracking and oil drilling and nuclear waste disposal, arguably it makes even more sense. A lot of the best new ideas of the past few decades fit this same basic pattern: they’re old. Consider the movement known as New Urbanism. In its charter, the movement calls for public policies that encourage compact, walkable cities with ample public spaces. As it happens, this was the only kind of city people built for 5,000 years or so, until the internal combustion engine, the oil industry, and the freeway system made sprawl possible. A variation on New Urbanism known as New Pedestrianism goes one step further. It aims to reshape car-dominated streets into lanes designed for walkers and bikers only. Here’s another idea whose time has come, and gone, and come again. Or consider the local food movement. For much of American history, just about everyone ate locally and also seasonally—not on principle so much as because the alternative, generally, was not to eat at all.
illustration by ellen weinstein
think again
As the authors of Eating in America, Waverly Root and Richard de Rochemont, observe, in colonial days “fresh food was unlikely to reach markets more than a few miles from the place where it was produced, for it was not easy to get around.” In the spring, dirt roads were quagmires, and in the winter they were frozen solid. Of course, in the days before refrigeration, most fresh foods didn’t last more than a few days, so even if there had been a way to transport them, there wouldn’t have been much point in it. Nowadays, no matter where you live in the United States, chances are there’s a supermarket not too far from you that carries a United Nations’ worth of fresh foods: asparagus from Peru, lamb raised in Australia, fish farmed in China. Eating locally and seasonally thus requires more effort than eating internationally. It also requires sacrifice; to do so means saying good-bye to tomatoes in January and apples in April. In many fished-out parts of the country, it probably means doing without fish altogether. Which brings me to the theme that unites these ideas—both in their original and in their contemporary forms—which is limits. When the Reverend Holyoke ran out of tallow, he bumped up against a set SHORT TA K E
Answers From the Past So intrigued were we at OnEarth by the underlying concept of Elizabeth Kolbert’s essay that we were inspired to keep this fascinating conversation going among our writers, editors, and readers. Throughout the month of December, the regular roster of online columnists (plus a few special guests) at onearth.org will pick up where this piece leaves off, exploring the ways that much of our contemporary thinking on sustainability has been influenced—or ought to be influenced—by wisdom generously handed down to us from previous generations. As our current rates of scientific discovery and technological innovation continue to accelerate beyond our ancestors’ wildest dreams, it’s easy to forget that those ancestors—even the ones we might characterize as “primitive”—provided us with the foundation, tested by centuries of trial and error, for all of our progress. From wildlife management to urban planning, from energy efficiency to water conservation, our modern environmental discourse is built from borrowed ideas. Visit onearth.org/answersfromthepast to find out what they are.
of constraints that were easy to understand. The candles were gone. It was pointless to resent this fact, or to try to argue it away. Today the limits are a lot less obvious. As long as the utility bill gets paid, an apparently limitless flow of electricity emerges from the socket. As long as the pump accepts your credit card, seemingly limitless amounts of gasoline are available. But just because the limits aren’t immediately clear, it doesn’t mean they don’t exist. In fact, the more we learn about the effects of our collective consumption, the more urgent the limits we’re approaching seem to become. According to the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, unconstrained growth in carbon emissions is likely to lead, by the end of this century, to a horrifying seven-degree increase in average global temperatures. The consequences of such an increase are almost too awful to contemplate, and include an eventual sea level rise of upward of 20 feet. Thus the predicament we find ourselves in is in many ways the mirror image of the one our forebears confronted. It’s not that we don’t have access to resources. It’s that we have access to too many resources: tar sands oil, anthracite coal, unconventionally extracted natural gas. This predicament has led many very serious people to argue that what we really need are new technologies that will save us from ourselves. According to this way of thinking, either we have to find a way to counteract the worst effects of our emissions by, say, throwing sulfates into the stratosphere, or we need to find some new source of energy that will allow us to continue to consume at the present rate without re-creating the climate of the Cretaceous. Finding such a technology is essential, this line of reasoning has it, precisely because people are never going to choose to leave resources unconsumed. I find this argument unpersuasive. The notion that we’re going to come up with some fix that will allow people (and, unfortunately, only people) to transcend geophysics sounds a lot like wishful thinking and, I’m afraid, will turn out to be wishful thinking. In any event, wouldn’t it be prudent, at least until such a technology is invented, to see what could be accomplished via more low-tech means? How about if we all—metaphorically speaking—tried turning off unneeded lights and putting on a sweater? No one has made the case for looking forward by looking back more eloquently than the poet, farmer, essayist, and critic Wendell Berry. (Like my father, I should note, Berry is a great advocate of good, old-fashioned frugality.) “People of intelligence and ability seem now to be genuinely embarrassed by any solution to any problem that does not involve high technology, a great expenditure of energy, or a big machine,” he has written. But “human limitlessness is a fantasy”—and a dangerous one, at that. For while we may have the power to destroy the natural world, we will never entirely control it. “Our great need now is for sciences and technologies of limits,” Berry has observed. For “we are not likely to be granted another world to plunder in compensation for our pillage of this one.” Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer at the New Yorker. Her upcoming book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Henry Holt), will be published in March.
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risk
IN THE WOMB Dangerous toxic exposures can begin long before birth.
photographs by clarissa bonet
cover story
x
Generation To ic by florence williams
we’ve known for
years that lead
seriously impairs early childhood development. now scientists are finding that our kids’ brains are at risk from a barrage of other common chemicals.
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C
arlos Jusino grew up a typical
kid in Harlem, rollerblading near the Hudson River, eating at the McDonald’s on 145th Street and Broadway, hanging out with friends in his building. Also typical was the fact that many of Jusino’s neighbors and family members, including his mother, had asthma. “When I was growing up, she went to the hospital about once a month for asthma,” he says. Although he didn’t know it at the time, more than 30 percent of the kids in Harlem have asthma, one of the highest rates in the country. Jusino’s family was worried about the air quality around Harlem, but most of its attention was directed to a sewage treatment facility built in 1985 along the West Side Highway next to the Hudson, where a foul-smelling settling tank lay exposed. The plant galvanized the community, including a group of environmental justice activists known as the Sewage Seven. They sued the city and won a settlement in 1994 that helped establish air-monitoring stations around the plant. Harlem is plagued by health conditions not uncommon among the urban poor. In addition to suffering from asthma, children here have high rates of obesity and, perhaps most alarming, significant learning disabilities. Increasingly, medical researchers are discovering that all of these syndromes are linked at least in part to environmental factors, from nutrition to tobacco smoke to industrial chemicals. Jusino, like many, was stunned to learn that pollution’s biggest target may be not our lungs but our brains. Researchers are finding the Harlem population to be a valuable source of data, and what they’re learning is both illuminating and worrisome. And if you think poor air quality is limited to disadvantaged urban neighborhoods, think again. Harlem’s problems are shared by the rest of the country. If clues can be found here, the lessons can apply elsewhere. As many as one in six children nationwide has a neurodevelopmental disability, including autism, speech and language delays, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that ADHD alone affects 14 percent of children, although experts debate whether it may be overdiagnosed. In any case, the number of children needing special education services has increased 200 percent in the past 25 years. In a 2000 report, the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences estimated that 3 percent of brain disorders are caused outright by environmental toxicity and an additional 25 percent by environmental exposures interacting with genetic susceptibilities. Every day, America’s pregnant women and young children are exposed to a trifecta of suspected neurotoxicants in the form of pesticides (mostly via food and water but also home, lawn, and farm applications), polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAH (mostly via exposure to vehicle exhaust), and polybrominated diphenyl ethers, or PBDEs (flame retardants, mostly in upholstered furniture and electronics). The CDC routinely samples
Americans for these and other industrial by-products in our bodies, so we know their reach is pervasive. But we are not all equally exposed, and some of us appear to be more vulnerable to them for reasons that may include genetic susceptibility, poor nutrition, stress, and age. Jusino joined a youth group through his high school in Washington Heights in 1994 and started mapping, block by block, local sources of pollution, including dry cleaners and diesel-spewing bus depots. In 1997 he joined the staff of West Harlem Environmental Action (We Act), a group co-founded by Peggy Shepard, one of the Sewage Seven. Today, as a GIS mapping specialist and technician, he is the proud chief caretaker of Aethan, a retro-looking black box that records real-time black carbon pollution. The size of a microwave oven, the Aethalometer (from the Greek word meaning “blacken with soot”) sends out several feet of PVC pipe through a window overlooking the corner of 152nd Street and Amsterdam Avenue, where the We Act offices occupy a light-filled, redbrick former police precinct house. Aethan looks retro, but he has a Twitter account, where he says things like “Holy pollution, Batman! Look, the WE ACT Aethalometer
risk
IN THE CLASSROOM Scientists are finding links to learning disabilities.
this article was made possible by the nrdc science center investigative journalism fund 3 0 onearth
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reading is at 2,780 nanograms per cubic meter.” (For perspective, during low-traffic weekends, the readings hover around 1,200.) “The readings get really high around 3:00 p.m.,” said Jusino, who, at age 35, sports silver-rimmed glasses and a trim goatee. Outside, it was early evening, and the machine was reading in the mid-700s. I couldn’t help imagining dark whorls of goblin-faced spirits wafting up to choke us at the windows. It’s a misconception, though, that the worst air pollution is visible. We tend to equate it with smog. Smog exists, of course, but it was largely knocked back under the air-quality controls of the 1970s. Over its 40-year life, the Clean Air Act has radically cut many ingredients of smog: carbon monoxide emissions are down 82 percent, sulfur dioxide 76 percent, and ozone 28 percent. However, there are virtually no regulations governing fine particulate matter smaller than 2.5 microns, known as PM 2.5. This is the black carbon–related stuff responsible for two million premature deaths globally each year. It also contributes substantially to climate change. A recent study by a team of 31 geophysicists found that black carbon is “the second most important human emission in terms of its climate forcing in the present-day atmosphere.” Black carbon is a component of particulate matter left over from the incomplete combustion of fuels in vehicle engines, apartment-building boilers, cooking stoves, and other sources. Aethan’s 3:00 p.m. peak is the product of diesel-powered vehicles, including school buses. Harlem has one of the highest levels of black carbon in New York. In part, this is because of the high density of older buildings, which tend to have older, less efficient, and poorly maintained heating systems. But diesel fuel is also a major source of black carbon, and Harlem is home to six of Manhattan’s seven transit bus depots as well as commercial trucking routes. By 2006, after a big public campaign spearheaded by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), city transit buses that had previously used dirty diesel switched to a combination of filters and cleaner fuel. But plenty of other fleet vehicles, older school buses, and ships passing close by still burn the bad stuff. A host of ills has been attributed to fine particulate pollution, including heart and lung disease, sometimes causing premature death. Black carbon is considered a reliable co-conspirator of PAH, a class of compounds that are also by-products of combustion. (Black carbon is easier to measure than PAH and, depending on location and source, tends to be highly correlated with them.) When inhaled, fine particulates go deep into the lungs, but they also travel to the brain, where they can alter DNA expression, cause inflammation, and possibly gum up neuronal circuitry. Jusino and others wondered: could these and other common contaminants be contributing to the high incidence of neurodevelopmental delays in the children of Harlem?
illustration by bruce morser
N
orthern Manhattan is home to not only some
of the best music, soul food, and dance troupes in the city but also one of its most venerated medical research institutions, Columbia University Medical Center. Frederica Perera was a young cancer researcher there in the 1980s when she decided to collect tissue samples from human placentas, expecting that they would be “pristine,” or untouched by environmental exposures. “But we found there were fingerprints on these samples of DNA damaged by pollution, even in women who weren’t smokers,” she recalled from her office at the Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health on West 168th Street. “It made me concerned about fetal expo-
from nrdc new discoveries
Linda Greer Director of NRDC’s health and environment program, based in Washington, D.C.
How does NRDC’s health program keep up with the discoveries that scientists like Frederica Perera are making? Our staff is pretty heavy on scientific expertise. We have four Ph.D. scientists, a public health specialist, an expert on toxic exposures, and a chemical engineer. We’re all so fascinated with these advances that we actually talk about them over lunch! Findings such as those described in this article make us even more deeply concerned about threats to the developing fetus. We’ve known about fetal alcohol syndrome for a long time, and we’ve also known that lead is most dangerous to infants and children, whose brains are still developing. Now we are realizing that even some cancers may ultimately be best understood as birth defects, traceable back to a harmful chemical exposure that set the stage for disease later in life. With 80,000 chemicals on the market, how do we begin to protect ourselves from all these potential health threats? It’s a huge challenge. Even with a Ph.D. in environmental toxicology and more than 20 years of work experience, I don’t feel I know enough to protect myself and my family through screening what we buy. For that reason, we really need the government to be the cop on the beat. Our team has invested tremendous energy on pushing for reform of the Toxic Substances Control Act, a law that is 40 years old and shockingly obsolete, with only five chemicals regulated. We have to start by setting priorities—identifying the worst pollutants in our air, water, food, shelter, and consumer products. We are doing a lot of consumer education, but truthfully it’s almost impossible to solve this problem through consumer choices alone. Do we have to wait for the law to change before we can get specific products off the shelves? No, we’re also pressuring companies to remove certain harmful ingredients from their products, particularly focusing on “stupid chemicals.” For example, the antimicrobial triclosan, which is in some liquid soaps, serves no useful purpose because soap itself is antimicrobial. And triclosan is a serious endocrine-disrupting chemical. We could eliminate it without any loss of effectiveness. We’re also looking more these days at pollutants from abroad—for example, mercury and certain pesticides that cross the Pacific and contaminate the air we breathe or end up in our imported food. Working on these globalized problems gets us a lot of frequent flyer miles!
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sures. I really wanted to look more closely at this window.” Although she started out looking for cancer markers, she was soon curious about other pressing health conditions in the Harlem community. That Perera was even looking at environmental causes of illness was both unusual and unfashionable. For the past two decades, cancer researchers and other molecular biologists have spent much of their time riveted by the genome, believing it would unlock the secrets of disease. But cellular life isn’t determined simply by the blueprints of DNA. It’s now understood that cells are designed to interact nimbly with the outside world and that genes get turned on or off—and are sometimes mutated altogether—by environmental exposures from diet, inhalation, even transmission through the skin. To truly understand human health and disease, scientists need to look at both the genome and—to use a term coined in 2005 by Christopher Wild, a cancer epidemiologist—the “exposome.” Perera decided to do just that. Today, as director of the Columbia center, she oversees what has become one of the most respected epidemiological data troves in the country. (She is also a trustee of NRDC.) Starting in late 1998, Perera and her colleagues recruited more than 700 pregnant women from hospitals in Harlem, Washington Heights, and the South Bronx for what’s known as the Mothers and Children Study. Now, 15 years later, the team has retained three-quarters of its original participants, and the first babies are entering their teenage years. Such “prospective” studies, which follow a group over time and measure their health outcomes, are considered the gold standard in scientific research because they don’t rely on retrospective memory or old, imperfect medical records. Blood and urine samples have been banked since the mothers’ pregnancies and deliveries, as have samples from the children, and researchers can go back to these as they ponder new questions. It’s now known that many chemicals can cross the placenta, once believed to be a sacrosanct barrier. This is disquieting, because the vast majority of these chemicals have never been tested for human health effects. Furthermore, the medical community agrees that many diseases and conditions, including obesity, cancer, and autism, are modulated by both genes and fetal exposures. In September, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the American Society for Reproductive Medicine issued a joint statement saying, “The scientific evidence over the last 15 years shows that exposure to toxic environmental agents before conception and during pregnancy can have significant and long-lasting effects on reproductive health.” (The chemical industry, however, is seeding doubt. The American Chemistry Council’s chief medical officer responded that ACOG’s evidence was based on “a limited number of flawed studies.”) It makes sense to developmental biologists that fetal exposures matter; this is when the cells in the body and brain are on the biggest adventure of their lives, differentiating and replicating like a one-way train. Once it’s left the station, it doesn’t go back. Children, of course, are harder to study than lab animals, because they are exposed to so many different conditions that can confound the results. That’s why large, prospective epidemiological studies are so critical. Perera knows both what’s in these babies’ bloodstreams and what happens to them as they age. The larger the study, the stronger the statistical power. Even so, epidemiological findings are necessarily couched in terms of “associations” rather than causal 3 2 onearth
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links. So epidemiologists often look to better-controlled animal studies as a guide, as well as to molecular lab investigations of human blood and tissue samples. With enough replication and diverse strategies, a picture begins to emerge. The center’s early studies found significant associations between pollutants measured in the mothers and difficult birth outcomes, including low birth weight and small head circumference. The main culprits were PAH and chlorpyrifos, a then-common organophosphate pesticide used indoors to kill roaches and bedbugs. (Later the team would look at flame retardants.) Perera also documented that these chemicals damaged cellular DNA. Chlorpyrifos was found in the umbilical cords of virtually every mother in the early samples. Since 2001 it has been phased out of residential use, but exterminators are still caught using it. It also remains a common agricultural pesticide and so ends up as a residue in food. Perera and her colleagues knew that reduced head circumference had been linked to lower IQ scores, and animal experiments had shown that chlorpyrifos killed developing brain cells and induced behavioral changes in rats. In some well-known experiments, for example, rats given low doses of the pesticide while in the womb or shortly after birth later had frederica perera trouble learning their way around a maze. began by lookAlthough Perera and ing for cancer her team didn’t know how these chemicals markers, but she might be changing the brain, they were deterwas soon curimined to find out all ous about other they could about the children’s growth and pressing health development. The children (now teenagers), conditions in who are mostly Dominithe harlem can and African American, would be regularly community. tested on everything from reading ability and motor skills to psychological yardsticks like aggression, risk-taking, and depression. By the time they were 3 years old, the children with the highest exposures to the pesticide tested as much as six points lower on motor skills and three points lower on mental development and were significantly more likely than those with lower exposures to suffer from attention and hyperactivity problems. These findings were published in 2006 in Pediatrics. Other studies showed that children most exposed to PAH were nearly three times as likely to show cognitive developmental delays. By the time they were 7, the children most exposed to chlorpyrifos were showing deficits in working memory, a key component of IQ. Their working memory declined by 2.8 percent and their full-scale IQ by 1.4 percent, after adjusting for variables like tobacco smoke and maternal intelligence. The center’s findings on the cognitive impacts of PAH and pesticides bolster what other researchers have found in Boston, Cincinnati, and California. Perera teamed up with a similar cohort study in Poland that found that higher prenatal exposure corresponded to an average
r i sk
IN THE PLAYGROUND Exposure to lead can result in aggressive behavior.
3.8-point drop in IQ in 5-year-olds. This drop is comparable to the effects of lead, the discovery of which, in the 1970s, eventually triggered a massive public health response in the form of laws removing lead from automobile gasoline, restricting it in household paint, and, to this day, requiring lead tests in children in many parts of the country. Now that the Harlem children are older, the team is examining whether the ill effects of fetal and cumulative exposures play out in other ways—poor academic performance, impaired social skills, anxiety and depression, and self-destructive behavior. On the day I visited the center this fall, a mom—let’s call her Michelle—and her 14-year-old son came in for a couple of hours of assessments. They were both greeted by a tremendous hug from Diurka Maria Diaz, a researcher and counselor who has followed the families from the beginning. “You’re taller than I am now!” she teased the boy. Hefty, dressed in black pants and a black sweatshirt, he towered over his toddler sister. She is also in the study, which continues to recruit new participants who likely have different exposomes. While Michelle’s placenta absorbed chlorpyrifos during her son’s gestation, it probably absorbed replacement pesticides during her daughter’s. The replacements come from a class of chemicals known as pyrethroids, whose neurodevelopmental effects remain largely unstudied. Diaz, who is known to the families as Didi, exudes warmth and charisma as well as concern for the challenges faced by kids in the study. “It’s hard to be a 14-year-old,” she says. “Many of these kids are overweight, many are depressed. We’ve referred about 40 percent for counseling.” Furthermore, she says, a remarkable 70 percent of children under the age of 3 have developmental delays that qualify
them for New York City’s early intervention services. Such delays are typically attributed to growing up in impoverished environments with relatively low parental involvement, low mental stimulation, and pervasive psychological stress. Perera’s team, though, is convinced that fetal environmental exposures play a role and that their effects may be aggravated when combined with maternal stress, as well as when combined with one another. “In the past, we took a reductionist approach,” Perera says, “a single exposure, a single effect. But now we think that pollution interacts with nutritional and social susceptibility factors. We’re making heroic attempts to measure these. We’re building the exposome.”
T
he environmental trail of brain damage extends
far back in history. Accounts of lead toxicity date to the Greek physician Nicander of Colophon in 200 B.C. In more recent times, a French physician in 1848 described ill-tempered infants who’d been sucking on lead soldiers. More examples of damaged childhoods came to light after twentieth-century commercial and industrial exposures. A cheap, arsenic-laced stabilizer was added to powdered milk in Japan during the spring of 1955, causing sickness, epilepsy, or lowered IQ in more than 12,000 victims, most of them infants. (Studies of nerve cells in a Petri dish suggest that arsenic inhibits cell growth and, in the developing brain, reduces the branching of dendrites—the structures of neurons that send and receive signals.) Also in the 1950s, a factory in Minamata, Japan, began releasing mercury into the local bay, ultimately causing severe physical and cognitive problems in children whose mothers ate contaminated fish while pregnant. winter 2013/2014
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IN THE BEDROOM TV sets and pajamas both contain harmful flame retardants.
By the mid-1970s researchers around the world had documented cases of lowered IQ in children exposed to lead from air pollution, mercury-based preservatives in grain, and polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) in fish, as well as in those exposed to alcohol in utero. The effects were much greater in children than in exposed adults. These were, as the neurotoxicologist Pam Lein of the University of California, Davis, puts it, “the blunt ones”—exposures whose effects became apparent after some concerted research. But no one really understood how the toxins worked, and they didn’t know if other, more subtle, discoveries awaited. In 1972 a Danish medical student named Philippe Grandjean saw a young woman on television who was suffering from so-called Minamata disease. Exposed to mercury in the womb, she could hardly talk and was afflicted by a severe spastic limb condition. Grandjean wondered why he wasn’t being taught about environmental exposures if they could cause so much damage. He decided to spend his life researching neurotoxicants, which he terms “brain drainers.” Since then he has written more than 100 papers on mercury, taught a couple of generations of scientists, and as both a physician and a researcher has an understanding of the micro and macro scope of the problem. What he told me wasn’t comforting. “Because the human brain is so complex, it’s incredibly vulnerable,” says Grandjean, now an adjunct professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and the author of the 2013 book Only One Chance: How Environmental Pollution Impairs Brain Development and How to Protect the Brains of the Next Generation. “Even if something goes a little bit wrong, you don’t get a second chance,” he says. “You’re stuck with it, and even small deficiencies can be quite significant.” As Grandjean explains it, shortly after conception, the brain begins to form from a tiny strip of cells. At its fetal growth peak, 12,000 cells are generated every minute, or 200 per second. These cells start sending and receiving messages and migrating to specific locations. By the time the brain is fully baked, it has close to 100 billion nerve cells and roughly as many caretaking glia cells, which provide nutrients, sweep out dead cells, and insulate nerve fibers. “If cells are in the wrong place or they don’t form the right connections,” Grandjean says, “that’s what you’ve got for your whole life.” In a groundbreaking review published in the Lancet in 2006, Grandjean and his co-author, Philip Landrigan, of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City, identified 201 heavy metals, solvents, pesticides, and endocrine disruptors known to have toxic effects in the human brain (at least 1,000 other substances are neurotoxic in animals but haven’t been tested in humans). Of those 201, about half are “high production volume” chemicals, made in or imported to the United States in excess of one million pounds per year. At the time, the authors could point to only half a dozen as showing evidence of developmental toxicity in the fetal brain, but the count is now up to 10 and growing. All of these neurotoxicants are relatively common, routinely found in the blood of pregnant women. They include the usual suspects—lead, methylmercury, and PCBs—but also organochlorine pesticides like DDT (which was banned in the 1970s but still persists in soil and water), organophosphate chemicals like the roach-killer chlorpyrifos, PAH, PBDEs (this pervasive class of flame retardants is now being phased out), arsenic, ethanol, and the solvent toluene. We are beginning to learn more about how these substances may alter brain development. Their strategies are complex and varied. Under the
influence of methylmercury, for example, the brain’s nerve cells “are lying helter-skelter, not in their usual logical locations,” says Grandjean. Pesticides are designed to be neurotoxicants—that’s the whole point—and some, like chlorpyrifos, work by inhibiting cholinesterase, an enzyme critical to brain-cell communication. Different neurotoxicants affect children differently. At high levels, methylmercury appears to cause memory deficits, while lead primarily decreases attention span and pesticides tend to impair spatial perception. Black carbon apparently affects attention and processing speed. Not all kids are equally vulnerable. Other factors matter, like genes, psychosocial stress, and, interestingly, gender. Boys tend to be more vulnerable than girls to the deficits associated with PAH. Studies of prenatal exposures to phthalates and bisphenyl-A (BPA), both endocrine disruptors, philippe grandjean also show gender differences. Phthalates says, “if cells are are considered antiandrogens, while BPA in the wrong acts like an estrogen, and the developing brain place or they takes important cues don’t form the from both hormones. With chlorpyrifos exporight connecsure, for example, boys have greater difficulty tions, that’s than girls with working what you’ve memory. Many of these subgot for your stances disproportionately affect the poor, but whole life.” not all. Poor kids are exposed to more lead and first- and secondhand tobacco smoke. More affluent populations accumulate more mercury from their diet. Urban kids may be exposed to more PAH and black carbon, farm kids to more pesticides and arsenic from well water. Of all the suspects, brominated flame retardants may be the most democratic. Although levels of PBDEs are now dropping in pregnant women, Americans still have the highest levels tested anywhere in the world. Flammability standards enacted in California in the 1970s resulted in the addition of PBDEs to everything from electronics to home furnishings nationwide. Unfortunately, the molecules easily migrate, accumulating in blood and breast milk and persisting for years. Structurally similar to PCBs in some cases, they appear to interfere with thyroid hormone signaling, either by directly altering the amounts of hormone or by blocking the hormone transporters. As researchers learned from studying cretinism, thyroid hormones are critical to brain development, among other functions. A University of California, Berkeley, study of children in the state’s Salinas Valley reported that those born to mothers with the highest levels of PBDEs during pregnancy averaged six points lower in verbal IQ and had lower scores for fine motor skills and a higher risk of hyperactivity. And PBDEs probably don’t act in isolation. Per Eriksson, a Swedish toxicologist, has found that when lab animals are exposed to both PBDEs and mercury, the neurological effects are significantly stronger than those of mercury alone. winter 2013/2014
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P
hilip Landrigan directs the Children’s
environmental Health Center at Mount Sinai Hospital. Like Grandjean, he is a pillar in the field; in the 1970s, he linked childhood IQ deficits to low levels of lead. More recently he’s been integral to health studies of rescue workers who were exposed to toxic particles during 9/11. Caps from the New York City police and fire departments and the U.S. Navy decorate his office on East 102nd Street. What worries Landrigan is how easily many neurological effects can fly under the radar. These are not the kinds of acute poisonings that land kids in emergency rooms. Most doctors are not trained to look for prenatal or childhood environmental exposures. If parents ask them about it, he says, “they tend to offer bland reassurance.” But for the individuals and families involved, learning, psychological, and behavioral impairments can have dramatic, lifelong impacts on meaningful measures from happiness to income. But do a few IQ points matter? Should society care if a boy behaves a few shades more or less aggressively? These are questions that currently interest epidemiologists more than family physicians. One of Landrigan’s associates at Mount Sinai, research scientist Megan Horton, who worked previously with Perera, told me that an average drop of five IQ points in the United States translates into 2.4 million gifted kids instead of 6 million, and 9.4 million mentally retarded children instead of 6 million, or a 57 percent increase. Leonardo Trasande, a pediatrician formerly at Mount Sinai and now at the New York University School of Medicine, has estimated that mercury exposures alone have led to losses of 0.59 to 3.2 IQ points in several hundred thousand children born every year in the United States, resulting in decreased lifetime economic productivity valued at $8.7 billion annually. Thanks in large part to the laws spurred by Landrigan’s epidemiological sleuthing, airborne lead pollution has declined 90 percent since 1980. With the decline has come a concomitant improvement in IQ scores and an intriguing drop in youth aggression and urban crime. Landrigan argues that the field of environmental health must become a centerpiece of public health. Mount Sinai has one of just 11 children’s environmental health centers nationwide. He’s disappointed that Congress last year pulled substantial funding from the once-promising National Children’s Study, which aimed to follow the exposures and health of thousands of children. At the same time, federal legislation that would strengthen the way chemicals are tested and regulated gets repeatedly stalled. “Clearly there’s a need for a new regulatory apparatus for testing chemicals, and the backlog is huge,” says Miriam Rotkin-Ellman, a senior scientist specializing in public health at NRDC. “There are also a lot of gaps in the science, both in terms of characterizing the health end points, such as autism, and in terms of understanding the mechanisms by which chemicals can interact with neurodevelopment. What’s the timing and what are the pathways of exposure?” Recognizing the need for more data, Landrigan’s program is about to launch its own $20 million prospective study following children from the womb through childhood. It will complement the work being done at Columbia and also at the University of Utah. “We will in some instances combine and pool our data in order to increase our ability to discover links between environmental exposures and disease,” says Landrigan. Meanwhile, Perera’s group has embarked on the next frontier in environmental health: brain imaging. Now that Columbia has data 3 6 onearth
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on exposures and cognitive problems, it makes sense to look at the brain structures themselves. Have the chemicals altered the brain in physically obvious ways? In a nutshell, “yes,” says Virginia Rauh, a perinatal epidemiologist at Columbia. Brain images of 5- to 11-year-olds with the highest exposures to chlorpyrifos show subtle deformations in parts of the brain associated with receptive language and social cognition and a thinning of areas of the parietal and frontal cortices, which are involved in executive functions like attention and problem solving. Using brain imaging to complement large-scale epidemiology is brand new. It’s also very expensive, and the technology is still being validated. Although Rauh admits that her team is “far from being able to say these changes are linked to impairment,” it’s time to focus on that question. “Public health has not really looked at the brain, other philip landrigan than with metals like lead and mercury,” she says. worries that “Our challenge is to link parmany neurologiticular deficits we’re seeing to meaningful impairment cal effects can so that we can intervene and prevent them.” fly under the
radar. these are
I
took the train
back home to Washington, D.C., passing through the northpoisonings that east corridor’s confused, land kids in emertight mix of commercial promise and marginalized gency rooms. decay. Over it all hung the molecular by-products of progress. To get a sense of just how far black carbon reaches into my own family’s life, I decided to take a cue from Jusino and his pet Aethan and order up my own air-monitoring companion for a few days. I called Steven Chillrud, co-director of the Exposure Assessment Facility Core at Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. An environmental geochemist, he tries to figure out how much black carbon people are exposed to by strapping carbon-measuring machines to buildings and sometimes car commuters, pedestrians, and bicyclists. He FedExed me a loaner micro-Aeth patched into a twill vest. I decided to call it Aethchyluth, honoring the urban Greek tragedian with a lisp. Aside from a few lumps, the device was fairly unobtrusive. No one seemed to notice the small sensor stretching upward toward my chin like a playful pet monkey. I wore it for most of three days while walking and driving around Washington in my daily routine. After I shipped Aethchyluth back, Chillrud sent me the data graph, which looks like an EKG reading, drawn in thin blue spikes. Then we matched the graph to the record from a GPS app, which had tracked my travels. High spikes occurred on I-495, the Capital Beltway, which wasn’t a surprise. Although I avoid it like the plague at peak rush hour, I’d driven it a couple of times at off-hours to visit relatives in southern Maryland. Even in my car with the windows rolled up, my levels hovered around the 6,000 nanograms per cubic meter mark, or
not the kind of
risk
more than twice the average reading Jusino was getting on his Harlem corner on a typical weekday. I pitied the people who drive this twice a day in slow-moving traffic, but they don’t get the most sympathy from Chillrud. “Schools and daycares are typically built on the cheapest land, often next to highways,” he says. “That’s where developing lungs are, and susceptible kids.” But as my readings made clear, schoolchildren don’t need a major freeway to breathe in black carbon and PAH. Aethchyluth got readings equal to the beltway in the parking lots at my kids’ schools. That’s because idling cars and school buses sit there just as kids are leaving. I was reminded of what a neuroscientist who studies brain inflammation told me: “I hold my breath when I’m behind a diesel bus.” Nineteen percent of Americans live near high-volume roads, and most areas don’t monitor the air. So just how bad were my readings? We don’t really know, says Chillrud, because the EPA hasn’t issued guidelines for black carbon pollution the way it has for other pollutants. Black carbon is complicated because it’s a proxy for many pollutants, he explains, and there are no consistent ways to measure it. In the meantime, city and federal officials recommend we reduce it through the use of cleaner fuels, newer engines, and, in New York City’s case, mandated higher-quality fuel oil. “It will gradually get better,” he says. “But there’s still a lot to do.” When I was in Harlem, Frederica Perera had laid out a busy future
iN THE KITCHEN Pesticide residues on food may contribute to lowered IQ.
of continued studies of childhood exposures to everything from PAH to phthalates to BPA to the newer pyrethroid pesticides. Her windows looked out over the Hudson River, a reminder of our collective interdependence on the air and water that both nourish us and transport pollution into our cells. The river glinted as it flowed out to sea. Once ragingly filthy, it is now cleaner than it has been in two generations. Policy changes work, and some of those changes are quickly mirrored in our bodies. After the residential phaseout of chlorpyrifos, levels in pregnant women fell significantly. A small study published in September in the journal Environmental Science and Technology found that levels of some brominated flame retardants in pregnant Californians were 65 percent For more on protecting your lower than in a similar group tested family from environmental health three years earlier (a phaseout began risks, visit onearth.org/health in 2004). By 2006, after converting to cleaner fuel and using filters, New York City’s transit buses reduced their emissions of particulate matter by 97 percent. “If the science is utilized well, policy makers can act. That’s why it is enormously helpful,” said Perera. “The good news is that by nature these exposures are preventable.” She stood up to go to a meeting, passing framed photos of four of her grandchildren. On her way out she sent a warm greeting to Michelle. More families would be arriving soon.
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The River And the Road alaska’s remote kobuk valley remains an unspoiled wilderness—at least for now By Gretel Ehrlich
orward a few paddles…” Joe says in a soft but urgent voice. Three of us—Joe Riis, Neal Conan, and I—are paddling 92 miles down the Kobuk River through the northernmost boreal forest in Arctic Alaska. Five rapids are looming. We can hear them, and because we’ve been cold and wet for the previous three days, we want to make sure we get through without mishap. We slip into an ever-narrower canyon that bends left. Where a rock wall shadows the water, only the sound of riffles is bright. Seven startled mergansers fly ahead of us. Then the five rapids come up fast. As the river foams and writhes, black spruce trees wave their arms: “Good-bye.” A sudden gust sends a shiver across the water. “Paddle hard!” Joe yells as the bow of our cumbersome raft pitches and bumps. The first four rapids were easy. The fifth is a class 4. Another bend and a wall of rock flies by. The rounded nose of the raft disappears in a gouged-out blue trough. I thrust my paddle down until the bow lifts. A standing wave hits my face, drains away. We laugh hard; we dig down with our paddles and slide through. The Kobuk River is located above the Arctic Circle at latitude 67° north, just below the Brooks Range. North of the river there are no trees, but here a “hedge” of boreal forest thick with black spruce, balsam poplar, white birch, and Arctic willow, plus cranberry and blueberry bushes, is threaded through with tributaries, oxbows, and sloughs that provide a rich habitat—what I call “landscape intimacy”—a sanctuary for an enormous diversity of mammals, birds, and fish in a wilderness that has not yet lost its wild. Flying from Fairbanks to Bettles, I get a sense of the whole—the vastness and complexity of the place. Mist rises from purple draws. Where trees have died out, the ground looks bruised. Wide plains of tundra are burnt umber, with wiggling streams pinched by black spruce and willows. We fly for hours: valley after valley has begun to turn copper and gold. Wide rivers are spliced together with sand and gravel bars. Dry melt ponds are pockmarks on the land. Here and there cliffs heave up, all gravel. Others are bald domes of rock. To the north are the treeless spires and pointed peaks of the great Arctic divide: the Brooks Range. Bettles, population 26, is noisy and chaotic. Helicopters are landing and taking off
photographs by joe riis
NORTHERN LIGHTS In some native Alaskan legends, the aurora borealis is the dance of the spirits of animals that have been hunted.
have seen many of the same shrubs, every half hour. When I ask where they lichens, and flowers we are seeing now. are going, I’m told they’re carrying maAt Walker Lake we portage our gear terials to build helipads, hubs that will made their way by scent and a quarter mile across a steep slope and enable the building and maintenance of a proposed 200-mile-long road to new memory up 200 miles of river sleep on reindeer lichen. The preferred food of caribou, it’s as soft and white copper, zinc, and gold mines near the village of Ambler. It’s what Alaska’s govto their b irth p l a c e a re as a cloud. For breakfast we feast on blueberries and oatmeal, then inflate our ernor, Sean Parnell, proudly calls one of spawning and dying. There are raft and put in on the Kobuk. Flowing the “Roads to Resources.” Ten million south for some miles, the river drops dollars of state Department of Transporso many carcasses that bears down as if pushed by the great bulk of tation funds have already been spent on the jagged range that divides this relaa project not yet approved, a road that and eagles, foxes and wolves, tively temperate terrain from the cold will probably be made big enough to carry 300 to 400 ore trucks a day traveltake only the good parts tundra that reaches all the way north to the Beaufort and Chukchi seas. ing at speeds of 70 miles per hour. Our raft bumps over dimpled water Late in the afternoon our floatplane and leave the rest to rot. as peak after peak lights up and goes takes us northwest and lands on dark in the rapidly changing weather. Walker Lake in the Gates of the Arctic Passing a tributary, I can see into the National Park and Preserve, which lies entirely above the Arctic Circle and is four times the size of Yellowstone. middle of this northern extension of the Rocky Mountains—Mount Inupiat people have been living in the Kuuvak (the Kobuk River Iqikpak and the Arrigetch Peaks pierce clouds and release powerful valley) for more than 12,000 years, with caribou, moose, Dall sheep, rivers: the Noatak, Killik, and Alatna, among others. To the south the Kobuk valley is a tangle of low hills and plains—algrizzly and black bears, salmon, whitefish, and berries in their diet. According to national park botanists, the polar climate here has helped pine tundra—and millions of acres of wetlands and lowlands, which are preserve a remnant flora seen during the Pleis- home to swans, geese, ducks, and songbirds, as well as moose. At Onion tocene, so that if, 14,000 years ago, you were Portage, more than 300,000 caribou from the western Arctic herd swim gone fishing an Inuit hunter from, say, Vankarem on the the river each fall and arrive on their wintering ground: open country all This male cub is a northeastern coast of Chukotka, in the Russian the way to the Yukon River and the Yukon-Charlie Preserve. recent addition to The 280-mile-long Kobuk River flows south at first, then veers west. northeast, and crossed the Bering Land Bridge Alaska’s population At its mouth, it drains into Hotham Inlet, then Kotzebue Sound and and arrived in the Kobuk valley, you would of 30,000 grizzlies.
chum salmon that have
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illustration by bruce morser
the Bering and Chukchi seas. Coastal Inupiat peoples who live on the Bering Strait have been marine mammal hunters and fishermen for thousands of years, and have always traded freely with the Nunamiut, the inland people: caribou skins and meat for seal oil and whale meat. This northwestern quadrant of interior Alaska, bordered by Barrow on the north coast, the Anaktuvuk Pass on the east, the Kobuk valley to the south, and the Bering Strait in the west, holds vast populations of caribou, grizzlies, black bear, moose, musk oxen, Arctic foxes and hares, hundreds of birds and fish, and more than 12,500 years of human culture. Yet it has only a handful of inland villages, six coastal villages and towns, and not a single road. It’s said that when fireweed loses its last, topmost blossoms, autumn begins. Never mind the calendar. Above the Arctic Circle the land has its own time line. In one day we have passed from summer into fall. The world has rusted: we travel through bog copper, melt pond glint, past a russet and burgundy wilderness. Red aspen-flames wind around S-shaped rivers. Deserted meanders curl into yellowing scars and thaw ponds. A dry oxbow is a sash of gold. A gash of green wiggles away from a fiery dome. Now rain clouds roll in fast. We paddle and drift. The thick, luxurious boreal forest crowds the banks. It’s an Eden where long avenues of glistening water are overhung with trees. In some places, stands of green sedge grass line banks of coarse rock in perfect, Japanese garden–style rows. Gravel bars are disheveled with clumps of fireweed sending out winged seed puffs, green-bladed wild iris, and red-topped sedge grass. Everywhere the sand is deeply imprinted with grizzly and wolf tracks. At water’s edge, chum salmon that have made their way by scent and memory up more than 200 miles of river to their birthplace are spawning and dying. There are so many carcasses that bears and eagles, foxes and wolves take only the good parts and leave the rest to rot. (In Fairbanks, when I asked an ecologist what the biological strategy of salmon dying this way might be, she said, “It’s not only about the food they provide upriver, but also the coastal nutrients they bring to the nutrient-starved glacial rivers and tundra soils.”) Cold rain bangs down and a headwind pushes our boat backward. Arctic Alaskan summers are short and river miles (compared with air miles) are long. A hundred years ago, the seasonally nomadic people who still live along this waterway measured time in the wide, elastic cycles of breakup, fish camp, berry picking, caribou and Dall sheep hunt, freeze-up, winter fish weirs, winter trade fairs, and sacred events called messenger feasts where neighbors gathered to dance, eat, sleep, gossip, and relax before the rigors of spring began again. The crushing demands of an alien culture with its market economy, strange religion, and different language had not yet been imposed on them. Weather and seasons were the markers of activity and of spiritual and moral conduct for all. The people who lived on the Kobuk said that Tulungersaq, or Father Raven, formed all life in the world. They said, “He was no ordinary bird but a holy power…. He was squatting in darkness when suddenly he became conscious and discovered himself. Where he was he did not know; nor did he know how he had come there. But he breathed and had life. He was alive.…This land, the Raven called the World.” All sentient beings were thought to have personhood and, often, a dual existence. The transformation of animals into humans and humans into animals was a common occurrence; the peeling back of an animal’s
from nrdc the wild north
Chuck clusen Director of NRDC’s Alaska and national parks programs, based in Washington, D.C.
You’ve been working to protect wild lands in Alaska since the 1970s. What does Gretel Ehrlich’s article evoke for you? The account of her journey down the Kobuk takes me back to many past battles. Some we won, others we lost. Ever since the exploration of the central Brooks Range in the 1930s, conservationists have dreamed of creating a big national park in the region. But the mining industry also had designs on the area’s mineral resources. In the years leading up to the 1980 Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), federal lands were studied for designation as conservation areas, selection by the state for development, and for native peoples. The area described in the story was one of the most contentious. ANILCA created the beautiful Gates of the Arctic National Park, but it also left a large area to the southwest open for development, including the Ambler mining district. But the stakes are even higher in the fight to protect the Artic National Wildlife Refuge, north of the Brooks Range. That’s the biggest land fight of all, and ANILCA left it unresolved. The area has been a top conservation priority for decades. It’s home to more than 200 species. Every summer millions of tundra swans, snowy owls, eider ducks, red-throated loons, and a variety of shorebirds migrate there. It’s a critical birthing area for the Porcupine caribou herd. It has the largest number of female polar bears to den onshore. Since the 1980s there have been about a dozen major attempts in Congress to open the area to oil and gas leasing. So far conservation forces have won every time, but some of those victories have been tough, such as the time oil development was included in the budget bill that President Clinton vetoed in 1996. And that of course resulted in a government shutdown. What are the Alaska authorities doing about the refuge? Governor Sean Parnell is attempting to undertake a new seismic study of the coastal plain in hopes of claiming that there are greater amounts of oil present than were shown in earlier surveys in the 1980s. But the Department of the Interior has told him that authority to conduct a new study, as provided for in ANILCA, has expired. The state of Alaska is now threatening to sue the department to obtain the necessary permits. Meanwhile, the department has completed a new plan for the Arctic Refuge. It hasn’t been released yet, but we understand it will recommend that Congress designate the coastal plain as federally protected wilderness.
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skin could reveal its soul. Sila, or the power of nature, contained both humans are merely passing through another’s nation. Today it’s weather and consciousness. The two were bound together seamlessly. the nation of grizzly bears. Morning, and rain returns. The boat is pumped up and warm clothes An oxbow pinches itself and almost becomes a circle. We straighten out and enter mist. A cool sun appears and retreats, and I wonder what layered on: long underwear, heavy fleece jackets, down jackets, and, I am seeing: what is animal, what is human, and how does thinking- over these, waterproof clothing, and life jackets. The first paddle in the knowing mingle with air. Narrow inlets appear: I call them Duck Inns. morning breaks surface reflections into concentric circles that speak of They are small refuges out of the river wind, with reeds and grasses the reciprocal relationships among all things here, of mutual respect and in which to hide from eagles. In this one, a family of mergansers moral boundaries. By digging down with our paddles, we might enter openings and passageways; we might begin to understand the acute huddles at the far end. Something dark moves on a gravelly spit ahead. A large male grizzly, responsiveness of the planet to our presence and its impact on us. We a boar, comes into view. He doesn’t see our boat at first. He’s looking might begin to form a way of knowing this place. But that would take time. Here, the river water is translucent celadon, and as we drop in altitude, for salmon. There are rows of half-eaten fish on the gravel bar; he’s looking for something fresh. As we paddle into the bend, the bear spots we gain in avian activity: a group of eight mergansers floats ahead of us. He walks closer, lifts his nose, and sniffs. Now he stands. Will he the raft; others fly back over us, upriver. Glaucous gulls perch on gravel charge? We’re ready to paddle away from him, and our bear spray is bars, facing a cold sun that pops in and out of a sky layered with gray and lashed to the side of the raft in four places. Lifting his head, he tries white. A mother and her ducklings skitter, churning the water silver, to understand our scent: rubber or flesh? Friend or enemy? We drift and disappear into reeds. Four blue-winged teal fly up and over, almost closer. He drops down on all fours and steps into the water, then stops. touching our foreheads. A pair of osprey mate atop a nest that crowns He’s well-fed and glossy-coated—not hungry, only curious, but he’s had a black spruce. High above us, a pair of ravens shape their wings and make aerobatic dives, cawing and gurgling in raven-speak. Ahead, five enough. Turning on his heel, he clambers out of sight into the bush. geese scurry off a sandbar after two gulls The sky clears, but it’s cold. The water swoop down and heckle them. At the botis running fast and we paddle only to stay tom of a few steep banks are abandoned warm. At another bend we spot a grizzly beaver dens. A single muskrat pushes cub sitting in the river. We slow the raft a small mountain of dried grass across to watch. He’s bashing the water with his the river. paws, turning right and left: is he playing The river is moving at about three or looking for fish? As we come into view miles per hour, but fireweed seed is he stands. His coat is cinnamon, not dark faster. It flies past us in white puffs as like the boar’s. Now he’s submerged in if mimicking snow. Weather change: water up to his neck. His head swivels, hoods up. Graupel bounces off rubber, small ears listening. Sensing danger, or at then softens to cold rain. The headwind least the unknown, he quickly climbs the that has been pushing us stops suddenly. bank and crashes through a thick stand Ahead, raindrops float whole and bright of blueberries into the trees. on the river’s surface for a moment, then, We wait a bit longer. Maybe he’ll come one by one, like tiny lights, blink out. back. Then it occurs to us that his mother Looking down, up, and to the side, I must be nearby. We watch a bit nervously try to keep a panoramic vision of intefor her to show herself, but as we drift rior Alaska in mind: the thick ribbon of beyond his bathing spot, no sow appears. the Yukon River, the winding fence of All day we keep looking back as the boreal forest, the sawtooth peaks of the current bumps us forward, past shadBrooks Range, hummocky tundra and owed trees, over submerged rocks and frozen thaw ponds, and all the animals the flashes of fish going upstream to die. and people who have, for centuries, wanTime unspools beneath us, pushing us and becomes almost a circle. dered throughout. into the present. Now we are still and the An ecosystem is made up of “wholes river moves past without us. Shamans all we straighten up and enter within wholes” where everything is the way across the polar north said they could see into human/animal bodies and mist. a cool sun appears and bound together and in flux simultaneously. Lichens, willows, and grasses cointo mountains and ice; they could see the evolved with caribou, musk oxen, and past and the future. retreats, and i wonder what i moose. Salmon smell water, stream Warming myself by the campfire, I trace the outline of an animal track. am seeing: what is animal, what banks, and sand. Eagles spend summers feasting on eggs, fish, and carrion. GrizEvery sandy bank is etched with them. is human, how does thinking- zlies finish off meals of chum salmon with Our tents sit atop their comings and paws full of berries. This river cascaded goings. In no place else in the world knowing mingle with air. down from high mountains and glaciers have I understood as clearly that we
an oxbow pinches itself
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and is ocean-bound. Here, flesh and spirit are conjoined and on the move. The river is nest, morgue, water hole, pathway. It is what one native resident called simply “a good place to live.” At camp, the conversation returns to the proposed 200-mile industrial mega-road that will cost half a billion dollars to build over thawing tundra and wild rivers: more than 100 crossings of wetlands and rivers in all, some with culverts, others with bridges, in a part of the world where there have never been any roads at all. Acidic water runoff from the mines will pollute the waterways. The road may be built with asbestos-laden soil taken from the colorfully named Helpmejack Hills. In that case, plumes of asbestos dust would rise over the national park and would fly hundreds of miles, affecting the health of all who work on, live near, or travel the road. The governor has already signed a law that forbids anyone from suing the state or the mining companies for health problems—mainly mesothelioma—arising from the road constructed out of a hazardous material. We stoke the fire and wonder how such a plan could have gotten this far. The state of Alaska has already spent $20 million surveying the area. Companies using the road will pay $9.7 million a year to cover maintenance costs. Investment brochures claim that the mines will give out much more than that in copper, though their lifespan is relatively short, about 12 years.
nearly gone, and the threads that bind traditional culture together are broken. “We had everything we needed here,” a native friend told me, “before alien people came telling us we didn’t have enough.” Cold night. Ice on the water bucket. My dreams have been moving me through riffles, rapids, road-building, and whole cities teetering on stilts above shadow-dappled water. By midmorning the waning moon has ebbed away with the mist. A single raven flies low, wings creaking, and two seagulls make a laughing sound. We shake ice off our tents, roll them up wet, and keep going. Last night, listening for bear, we heard a distant wolf call. Before leaving I see his track by our tents, the place where he crossed next to the smoldering fire. The slaughter of wolves has been weighing heavily on national park visitors and employees. There’s an all-out culling effort by the state’s Department of Fish and Game to keep the declining caribou population up so that sport hunters can kill their quota, though officials can’t say with certainty why the caribou are in decline. As in all western states, money from hunting licenses keeps the department afloat—a conflict of interest, it would seem, with its mission to protect the wildlife. Last winter the agency killed 44 percent of the wolf pack that dens in the Yukon-Charlie Preserve from helicopters. Are they “park wolves” or “state wolves”? Who “owns” the wildlife?
the narrow tops of black spruce puncture night air.
The poet Derek Walcott wrote: “Motion is loss.” A few fat flakes flap down. Taking the place of jagged mountain peaks are high-rise clotted snow clouds. Downriver the water is glass and we keep breaking it. Humans have been changing the “natural world” for thousands of years, but playing God in a world deeply disrupted by politics, economics, territorial disputes, and climate instability rarely works out well. People have always used this river and continue to do so. The Kuuvanmiut (the people who live on the Kobuk) still have fish camps in the summer months that are overseen by women. The younger men walk to the first tributary north through mountain passes to the Noatak drainage to hunt caribou and Dall sheep. As soon as snow falls, they return and help the women at the camps, where fish are being dried and smoked and berry picking is ongoing. The men hunt nearby until winter comes on strong; then the whole population of a village returns to its winter camp. In earlier times, a taboo against living in the same house for more than one winter required the Kuuvanmiut to
map by mike reagan
Fifteen degrees Fahrenheit. We load our raft in light snow.
The beginnings of the aurora borealis show in the northern sky. One might ask, what is the value of wilderness, or a river, of tundra, or a boreal forest? The nuts-and-bolts answer is this: worldwide, boreal forests store more carbon than any other terrestrial ecosystem— almost twice as much as tropical forests. Here, carbon is stored not only in living trees and plants but also in the peat and permafrost soils. The forest functions as a huge carbon vault, one of the earth’s “air conditioners,” where 47 percent of the songbird population of North America, 303 species altogether, breeds, nests, and fledges. It’s not so much that we are trying to save the beauty and efficacy of the natural world; rather, it saves us. Opinions about the road in the three villages of Ambler, Shungnak, and Kobuk are split. Many younger people endorse the road and the mines because they want and need jobs and money. Twelve thousand years of subsistence living no longer holds them. Their language is
THIS ARTICLE WAS MADE POSSIBLE BY THE JONATHAN AND MAXINE MARSHALL FUND FOR ENVIRONMENTAL JOURNALISM winter 2013/2014
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build new ones. Once that was done, they could spend long winter Shallow water and narrow spruce shadows nights in the all-day twilight, fixing dog harnesses, boats, and nets, fibrillate as if trying to pump life back into the fading day. Cutbanks and gravel bars slide by, islands in the streams of a braided river bulging and telling stories. Those were the days before snowmobiles cut through magic songs with small islands and hemmed by vegetation: havens for the wildlife that were sung for protection. The sparsely populated river valley here. Isn’t this enough for us humans? Do we have to pimp the earth was home to dwarfs, giants, and animals that assumed the shapes of for monetary gain at the expense of place itself? Does “progress” trump humans, then eased back into their animal skins. One legend tells of a human health, the rights of the grizzly, moose, or robin? Who speaks specially blessed young man who paddled the Kobuk in a canoe made for them? Who speaks for this river? An anguished bird cry awakens us from our midafternoon river-daze. by beavers and birds. Along the way he married a woman who turned We can’t see what’s happening at first, but around a bend we spot a out to be a red fox, and later he lived with a kindly giant. Spirits in the bodies of iñugaqalligauraqad—“small strong men”— bald eagle attacking a loon. Its mate flies back and forth over our heads, lived here and still do. In Seth Kantner’s 2004 book Ordinary Wolves, a crying for help. The eagle dives down repeatedly, trying to pick the bird man named Enuk said that iñugaqalligauraqad had come to his camp: out of the water. She tries to fly but can’t lift up. As soon as we approach, “They rob my skins. Meat. Caribou tongues even.” By comparison, the eagle leaves and the airborne loon rejoins its mate on the river. For half an hour, we float slowly behind the two birds as the female our overpopulated world seems thin, unspirited, and bleak. Farther downriver, we hear songbirds for the first time. We thought stretches her wings, shakes her head, and gets ready to fly. No eagle they had departed for the winter, but some are still here: a robin sings in view now. Finally the pair flap hard and lift up, disappearing into the a morning song and four Bohemian waxwings flap between birch trees. safety of the trees. One life saved by a boatful of strangers. On the wide gravel bars, tracks reveal that we’ve moved from I try to push away the black line of the proposed road that would tear apart the beauty of this place, and the human-drawn boundaries that grizzly into black bear country. But at the end of August, anything can change: something in my bones tells me that winter might begin allow senseless wolf depredations, and for awhile I do. Under a clear sky we drift in silence. Here, movement means not as early as tomorrow. To be on moving water is to ride an unrolling scroll. Wind scratches loss, but beginning again: we seem to be gaining on green. At midday blue skies reign. We eat lunch on a gravelly island. A tiny inlet is still messages on the water’s surface ahead: that’s our only future. Midice-choked, but the sun feels good on our tired shoulders. Glaucous stream boulders punctuate the flow of memory. Watch out. Veer left. gulls cruise by, eyeing our salami and cheese. As we start off again, Stay right. Don’t forget. Forward a few. Paddle hard now. As we eat an immature bald eagle flies toward us, all black feathers with white lunch, a wild iris brushes my arm, and the river, like a Tang dynasty spots, like an Appaloosa horse, then lifts up suddenly over our heads scroll, unravels time. A season changes one way, then goes back to and alights on a spruce. A northern shrike whistles. Two red birds we the other. Death thoughts gust by. Ice-gouged spruce tip over and thrum water like drumsticks; the vastness of the physical world and can’t identify poke their heads out of holes in a sandy bank. All week we’ve been hoping to see migrating caribou. There should our small place in it loom large. A layered cutbank flies by like a piece of time with its 53,000 years be thousands of them streaming through the trees and crossing water on their way south from the Noatak drainage, but none appear. They of geological depositions. At another site, the ruins of a 1,000-year-old will stay on the north side of the Brooks Range until heavy snow is inhabitation are revealed. Not far downriver, the people of the Kuuvak imminent. Though it has been cold here, real winter weather has not are netting chum, seining whitefish, and collecting berries in birchbark baskets that fold on top like huge envelopes. Spruce ladles, carved from arrived above the Arctic Circle. Instead of caribou, there are more birds: around a bend 17 or 18 hollowed-out burls, are still used for serving a lunch of fish-head soup. ravens circle trees, cawing, gurgling, making their strange sounds. Kids are shooing ravens away from drying fish, and resident dogs scare away bears. A green willow wall with Toolmakers and jokesters, they possess a small fire in the center smokes the the most diverse set of sounds—around last of the salmon. 30 of them—and speak in local dialects. A hundred years ago, people travMaybe they can talk someone into saving eled by skin-covered canoe, and when this valley. the river froze, they made their way on Pairs of Pacific loons float by around the sun called a dogsleds. In the fall, a huge trading and bald eagles flap between trees. fair began at Shesilik, near the coast. Ospreys carry fish in their talons to hidsundog, indicating a change Every river filled with travelers. Nunaden nests. Dead chum line the shore. miut (inland people such as those from Grizzly, moose, and wolf tracks pave the in w e a ther . b y m orning Kobuk and Noatak) carried caribou sandy banks. Earlier, snow filled their tracks separated by huge strides. Now everything is frozen solid— meat and hides in canoes to the coast, where marine mammal hunters from sun shines in them before retreating. Though the days are getting shorter, we sponge to frying pan, tent Wales, Shismareff, Kivalina, and Point Hope, as well as traders from the seem to be going backward in time. The berry bushes have lost their autumnal stake to ground. the lids of the Diomede Islands, came each year. Caribou, moose, bear, and inland ducks colors: we’ve entered a nation of birds bear barrels are iced shut. and birds were traded for maktak, and returned to the season of summer.
we see a huge black ring
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fierce predator The bald eagle can snatch a fourpound fish in its
walrus, seal oil, and whale meat. It’s still a sharing, trading society, and young men who hunt for a living can be seen carrying coolers full of seal oil and fat to inland settlements on floatplanes.
powerful talons.
What night is it? I can’t remember. But I know how cold it is: 15 degrees. We hover over the campfire. In the northern sky the aurora begins its pulse-dance of green and white lights. By one or two in the morning, it’s a green fist driving down toward the river, but on arrival there, its reflection softens and shivers. Morning, and we paddle out into a strong current. My dreams are all waterborne but darkened by thoughts of the road and the mines. With a tailwind, we don’t have to paddle, but only steer to keep the raft straight. Sometimes we make the raft spin and spin, taking in the 360-degree view amid laughter. Cottonwood leaves shush and clatter. “That’s the sound of autumn,” Joe says softly. But here, above the Arctic Circle, the air is already heavy with winter. To the north, the sawtooth-above-treeline wilderness of the Brooks Range has been blanketed with snow. We see a huge black ring around the sun called a sundog, indicating a change in weather. By morning everything is frozen solid—sponge to frying pan, tent stake to ground. The lids of the bear barrels are iced shut. Clouds called mare’s tails that foretell rain sweep across the sky like brushed hair. The river deepens and fills with schools of sheefish, a local whitefish that grows to be more than 30 inches long. They are ghostlike, swimming upstream. The songbirds have ceased singing. As the days go by, our brief summer reprieve vanishes. Motion is loss: we lose summer and enter autumn again. At the Pah River, where, before 1870, 15 “native” houses stood on these banks, the Kobuk slows and deepens. A Kobuk man far downriver stands on a sandbar, fishing. Is he a human or a bear?
Wind and the fading light pulse the river into hammered silver, then the water darkens into what looks like a lagoon. Beyond, tall mountains are black cutouts—an entry into another world. A floatplane drones by. A raven flies over. Which is the plane, which the bird, one wonders? Water is moving and bulbous clouds push down on it as if saying, “Don’t go.” Rain is on the way, or else snow. Only two miles remain of the 92 we will have paddled. Night. Raft unpacked, campfire started, soup cooking, tents set up, pads inflated, down bags rolled out, and a rind of moon falls behind the pulsing light of the aurora. Tonight it appears first as two spotlights that frame the Big Dipper. This is true north. Earlier we missed our camping spot and had to paddle upriver—a last arduous push before the end of river time. It’s not good to be careless. Herb Anungazuk, an anthropologist who grew up in Wales, on the Seward Peninsula, wrote: “The land and the sea will show you its wrath if you cannot read what it tells you.” Low, tight clouds close in above the trees and the mineral smell of snow erases the rain’s soft scent. We vacillate between wanting the floatplane to come soon and hoping we’ll be snowed into this remote valley all winter. At the last moment we get back in the raft and glide down Grolar bears? Read how climate to the other bank to make sure we are change is creating strange Arctic really in the correct place. hybrids at onearth.org/hybrids All week we’ve been moving in time, away from time, on top of time, all hopes and fears unspooling beneath us. But the road: will it come into being and corrupt this place? We dig in with our paddles and start back for camp. Joe whispers, “Forward a few paddles… Harder. That’s good.”
.org
Gretel Ehrlich’s most recent book, Facing the Wave: A Journey in the Wake of the Tsunami (Pantheon), was longlisted for the 2013 National Book Award. winter 2013/2014
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b y
k r i s t e n
oil and water TransCanada’s proposed Keystone XL pipeline would run from the Alberta tar sands to refineries in Texas. Facing concern over the risks of an oil spill, the company has revised the route of the pipeline to skirt the Nebraska Sand Hills, a major source of natural recharge for the Ogallala. But the new route would still cross the aquifer, including areas where water is less than 10 feet from the surface.
f r e n c h
aquifer alert
T
he high plains aquifer, also
known as the Ogallala aquifer, is one of the largest in the nation and the primary source of water for a vast stretch of our agricultural heartland. But what exactly is an aquifer, and how does it work? Many imagine a giant underground lake—in fact, the Ogallala is sometimes referred to as the sixth Great Lake. But it is actually more like a giant sponge, partially saturated with ancient glacial meltwater and consisting of layers of permeable rock, clay, sand, and silt deposited during geological shifts in the Rocky Mountain region millions of years ago. Underlying almost 175,000 square miles in eight states, the aquifer sustains nearly one-fifth of all wheat, corn, cotton, and cattle production in the United States. But several years of drought and decades of intensive crop irrigation have left it seriously depleted in some places, particularly in Texas and Kansas. (Recent rains have made little difference.) Drought conditions in areas just outside the aquifer, such as eastern Colorado, are also critical. Worse, depletion of the Ogallala is accelerating. With more severe droughts projected as a result of climate change, the aquifer may face even greater challenges in the future. And the quantity of water is not the only problem. Its quality is also threatened by the overuse of agricultural pesticides and now the risk of oil spills from the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. illustrations by jim kopp
underground sponge
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1 AQUIFER
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One key gauge of water capacity in an aquifer is u saturated thickness— the distance between the bottom of the aquifer, where it meets v bedrock, and w the water table, the uppermost surface of underground water. Saturated thickness varies widely throughout the Ogallala from year to year, from zero in parts of Colorado and New Mexico to about 1,000 feet in west-central Nebraska. The variation depends on the depth of geologic deposits as well as on local climate, rainfall, and irrigation. Water in the Ogallala generally flows west to east, but does not travel easily from one section to another, so water quality and supply are highly variable.
fight club Water rights have long been a source of conflict between states. But shrinking Ogallala reserves have worsened tensions in watersheds like the Red and Republican rivers, where downstream users are disproportionately affected. Claims by Kansas that Nebraska and Colorado have violated the 1943 Republican River Compact have come before the Supreme Court several times since 1998.
3 2 4 1 6 AQUIFER
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WATER CYCLE An aquifer is depleted primarily by u pumping for irrigation and v evapotranspiration from water, soil, and vegetation. The main sources of recharge are w precipitation, x runoff from heavy rains, and y excess irrigation water (as well as industrial wastewater and treated sewage). Rivers and streams z both discharge into the aquifer and carry water away from it, depending on local rainfall and the difference in elevation between riverbed and { water table, among other things. Soil composition is also important. Gravel and sand, being more porous, recharge more quickly. The soils atop the Ogallala are often clay and silt, so it recharges more slowly than some other aquifers. thirsty crops About 95 percent of the water pumped from the Ogallala is used for irrigation. Most of that water is fed into centerpivot irrigation systems, which made large-scale agriculture possible in the Plains. A more efficient technique called subsurface drip irrigation delivers water directly to the roots, greatly reducing waste.
Ogallala Ogallala Aquifer Aquifer Extreme Extreme to to Exceptional Exceptional Drought Drought Severe Severe Drought Drought
move ‘em out Drought has taken a heavy toll on cattle ranching, especially in Texas. Though recent rains have helped, grazing fields were too dry to support grasses over the summer, and the cost of commercial feed soared. Many farmers have been forced to sell off part of their herds.
Proposed Keystone XL Pipeline Keystone Pipeline Source: U.S. Drought Monitor, as of October 24, 2013
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B y j o c e ly n c . z u c k e r m a n
A world Away to feed the palm oil boom in the west, africa’s forests and farmlands are up for grabs photographs by marco di lauro
plowed under In northern Liberia, an Asian-owned company has begun work on an oil palm concession covering more than half a million acres.
Y
ou see that coconut tree?”
dispossessed In Sinoe County, Benedict Menewah, center, lost his farm and rubber trees to Golden Veroleum.
said Daniel Krakue, gesturing out beyond the windshield. “That used to be a village.” It wasn’t hard to see the tree. Apart from a skinny papaya trunk, it was the only thing rising from the surrounding sea of green. We were in Sinoe County, in southwestern Liberia, on a plantation run by a company called Golden Veroleum (GVL). For miles around there was nothing growing but baby palms, whose lime-colored fronds were about as wide, some three feet or so, as they were high. Earlier we’d driven through large expanses freshly cleared of their native vegetation, weird deserts of orange mud interrupted only by the corrugated wakes of the ubiquitous giant yellow earthmovers. The company has been in operation in Liberia only since 2009. And the 543,000-acre lease it signed with the government runs for 65 years, with an option for a 33-year extension, so GVL is just getting started. Krakue is an environmental advocate who has worked with the Sustainable Development Initiative (SDI), a local partner of Friends of the Earth, and he had accompanied me here from Monrovia, the nation’s capital, on a road so riven with ditches, potholes, and impromptu lakes that it took us eight hours to go 150 miles. Sinoe County is home to some 104,000 people, but its isolation and its history as a center of the civil wars that wracked this tiny West African nation from 1989 to 2003 have left it with the ambience of a place that’s been forgotten. We pulled over in a village called Pluoh, a scattering of mud-andthatch houses, where a sign staked in the ground read Malaria Spoils Belly. Aside from a few chickens scratching around and a preschooler 5 0 onearth
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in a raggedy party dress vigorously cranking a water pump, there wasn’t a whole lot going on. Little clusters of people sat on crude wooden benches propped beneath the thatch eaves of their huts, and the cries of babies floated on the still morning air. Krakue introduced me to Benedict Menewah, a scrawny 45-year-old father of seven, who filled me in on the story of the lone coconut tree. He described how GVL had shown up with its Caterpillars in the village he’d grown up in and where his father, Smart Williams, still lived. Hearing the sound of machinery, Williams, a 77-year-old with stooped shoulders and clouded blue eyes, had gone to see what was up. Representatives from GVL, a Liberian company whose anchor investor is based in Singapore, asked to see his father’s deed, Menewah said. “We don’t have a deed,” Williams told them, “but this is our land. Where would we get a deed from?” (In fact, very few rural Liberians have physical documentation related to the land their families have inhabited for generations.) “They said the land was for the government,” Williams told me later, “not for us.” The company proceeded to plow under the family’s cassava, yams, and plantains, in addition to the 500 baby rubber trees that Menewah had recently planted with intentions of selling the latex. They disassembled Williams’s home and put the mud bricks on a tractor so he could rebuild elsewhere. “The bush is our supermarket,” Menewah said, explaining how he used to hunt for small animals as well as gather fruit. “We get everything here. But now they’ve taken it all.” The company gave him a single payment of $340. Williams was particularly broken up about the two breadfruit trees that his great-uncle had brought back from Ghana in 1922 and which, along with bush meat and “palm cabbage” (finely chopped, tender young
palm leaves), had kept the family alive during the long years of fighting. “We lost our auntie, our uncle, our nephew, our niece,” Menewah said, spreading his arms to show me the horizontal scars from where the combatants had tied him up. The coconut tree had apparently been left, along with the nearby papaya, as a courtesy when the company bulldozed everything else around the graves of Williams’s father and uncle. GVL encircled these with a rickety wooden fence. Whenever he or his father tries to tidy up the way they used to, Menewah said, “the company says we are damaging their property.”
C
illustration by bruce morser
s. Jacob scherr Director of global strategy and advocacy for NRDC, based in Washington, D.C.
olonized by freed slaves from the United
States after 1820, Liberia has been a poster child for what is known in development circles as “the resource curse”—a place where natural bounty has translated into more harm than good. In the early twentieth century, the American rubber baron Harvey Firestone signed a 99-year lease to grow the commodity on a million acres, nearly 4 percent of Liberia’s total land area. In the 1990s, the warlord Charles Taylor turned to the nation’s abundant timber reserves to fund his exploits, which saw the deaths of some 150,000 Liberians and wiped out what little infrastructure existed in the country. (Krakue’s former colleague Silas Kpanan’Ayoung Siakor, the founder of SDI, teamed up with the London-based NGO Global Witness to document Taylor’s “logs of war,” ultimately helping to bring him down and earning the Goldman Environmental Prize.) But recent years had seen things beginning to look up. In 2005 Liberians elected Ellen Johnson Sirleaf president, Africa’s first female head of state. The Harvard-educated World Bank alumna took office with an uncommonly high and positive international profile, having both done jail time for her criticism of an earlier regime and served in the nation’s finance ministry. Johnson Sirleaf has continued to garner plaudits for leading her country out of its dark past, and in 2011 she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her role in promoting peace, democracy, and gender equality. She has steadily improved the nation’s economy. But she has accomplished this in large part by signing concession agreements with outside investors drawn to Liberia’s natural wealth, which, in addition to rubber and timber, includes rich mineral and agricultural resources. By 2012, Johnson Sirleaf had signed over a full 30 percent of the nation’s land. Such “land grabbing” isn’t restricted to Liberia. The World Bank has said that Africa is home to fully half of the world’s fertile yet “unused” land, and since the global food crisis of 2008, outsiders have acquired huge swaths of that prime acreage from governments eager for foreign cash. (Many of these deals have been financed by the bank itself.) By 2012, no fewer than 138 million acres of African land—an area larger than the state of California—had changed hands. Some of the new concessionaires are governments lacking arable land of their own, particularly in the Middle East. Others are multinational corporations responding to the growing global demand for biofuels and for diets heavier in grain-fed livestock.
T
from nrdc honest government
he oil palm companies in Liberia enjoyed
a brief honeymoon. (In addition to GVL, the Malaysian corporation Sime Darby runs a 769,000-acre operation in the north of the country.) But it wasn’t long before local communities began to cry foul. Villagers I met during a visit to the Sime Darby concession accused the company of destroying their crops
How widespread are the“land grabs” described in this story? Unfortunately, Liberia’s problems are not isolated. Some of the world’s poorest people increasingly have to compete with some of the richest for control of the same resources. For almost two decades NRDC has supported indigenous and other local communities threatened by enormous development schemes, especially in the Americas. For example, we worked with fishing communities to defeat plans for a massive saltworks at Laguna San Ignacio, Mexico, the last pristine nursery for the gray whale. That was a huge victory. In the 1990s we helped organize an international coalition to combat land grabs in coastal areas of Latin America, Africa, and Asia to farm shrimp, the most popular seafood in the United States. Why is there such a lack of accountability in these projects? The bottom-line challenge is the dearth of decent governance. In an online poll conducted by the U.N., more than 1.2 million people in more than 190 countries ranked 16 priorities for their families and for a better world. Interestingly, folks in both rich and poor countries named “honest and responsive government” in their top four. Liberians are far from alone in seeing a gap between what their leaders say at international summits about “sustainable development” and the realities at home. It’s clear that the existing international system, which is now 70 years old, is not up to the task of moving us rapidly to a more sustainable future. If the system is so badly broken, what can we do to fix it? NRDC played a leading role in last year’s U.N. Conference on Sustainable Development, Rio+20. We called for a new kind of summit, where leaders would do more than talk, and it was encouraging to see presidents, prime ministers, mayors, CEOs, and other leaders commit more than $500 billion for action on energy, oceans, transportation, cities, and other issues. One potential game-changer that came out of Rio+20 is the Tropical Forest Alliance, which brings together Unilever, Coca-Cola, and other multinational corporations to work with governments and conservation groups to make the global supply chain for palm oil and other commodities “deforestation free” by 2020. This was also the first summit of the Internet age. We saw what new communications technologies have begun to accomplish: unmasking wrongdoing, engaging citizens in worldwide campaigns against land grabs, and protecting the human rights of the poorest among us.
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daily commute and grave sites, polluting streams, displacing Golden Veroleum residents by force, and failing to get “free, workers cram onto a tractor-drawn prior, and informed consent” before clearing flatbed on their way their land. The work of planting and waterto plant and water ing the oil palm was too hard, they said, the the fields. wages too low, and safety equipment inadequate or nonexistent. The community in Grand Cape Mount County, home to a large part of Sime Darby’s plantings, eventually joined forces with SDI’s Siakor and the nonprofit Green Advocate Liberia, led by a lawyer named Alfred Brownell, in hopes of having their grievances addressed. In October 2011, a group of residents filed a complaint with the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO), the global certification body for the industry. A year later, the communities inside the GVL concession in Sinoe filed a similar complaint. Both concessionaires responded by commissioning studies by the Forest Trust, a Switzerland-based nonprofit focused on ethics and sustainability. The trust’s reports bore out most of the communities’ claims. Moving forward, it said, GVL and Sime Darby would need to review their landacquisition processes and their social and environmental policies and improve communication with the locals. The companies have been in damage-control mode ever since. “We are under siege,” GVL’s Viggy Ponnudurai told me when I visited the concession. GVL had invited journalists to visit, he said. “We have given them meals and treated them like our friends. And then they have still written bad things about us.” How did it all go so wrong? After all, there’s no question that Liberia can use whatever infusions of cash and whatever jobs it can get. “I think the two companies have come to the realization that they were misled,” SDI’s Siakor told me. The contracts that Johnson Sirleaf signed with Sime Darby and GVL stipulated that she would allocate the land “free of encumbrances,” he explained. “But those lands just don’t exist.” Compounding the problem is the fact that Liberians have seen this story play out before, with less than happy results, as I learned during a visit to the Firestone (now Bridgestone-Firestone) plantation, an hour south of Monrovia. The place is massive, with 200 square miles of shimmering trees, and boasts its own hospital, schools, churches, and bus service. But most of the housing—single-room shacks patched together with scraps of metal and wood—dates to the 1930s. Hanging in the air is an odor that’s one part sweet sap, one part raw sewage. The company’s 7,000 employees earn five dollars a day. The white liquid latex that they collect in buckets gets exported as it is, without any processing that might add value to the local economy. In the distance, I could see a group of laborers streaming down a narrow path bordered on either side by tall wire fencing. There were manned checkpoints throughout the concession. On a nearby hilltop, the management-only “staff club” served club sandwiches and cold Heinekens, while men in golf carts cruised the greens below. Alfred Brownell, who grew up dirt-poor in the shadow of one of Liberia’s big mining concessions, told me that back in 2005, when rumors of the oil palm companies’ arrival began to surface, “We said, ‘Don’t copy and paste the Firestone model. It’s a disaster for this country.’ And guess what? Sime Darby and Golden Veroleum? It’s exactly the same as Firestone.”
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T
he oil palm tree is actually native to west
and central Africa. A century ago, British siblings William and James Lever, whose company would become Unilever, ran a 17-million-acre palm concession in what was then the Belgian Congo. But it’s only in the past few years that the crop has begun to transform the landscape of this continent. For several decades planting was focused in Southeast Asia, with Malaysia and Indonesia together accounting for 85 percent of global output. With worldwide production now approaching 50 million tons a year, however—palm oil is present in half of all packaged food products, as well as in such drugstore staples as lipsticks and body lotions—producers have been scrambling to find new frontiers. Imports of palm oil to the United States alone have increased 485 percent in the past decade. The crop takes a dramatic toll on the environment. In 2007 the United Nations Environment Programme reported that oil palm plantations were the leading cause of deforestation in both Malaysia and Indonesia, removing a vital carbon sink and devastating the native habitat of orangutans and endangered Sumatran tigers and rhinos. The trees thrive at latitudes of roughly five degrees to the north and south of the equator, and in Africa that swath of earth runs thick with natural forest. The Guinean Forests, which stretch from Sierra Leone to Nigeria and once covered all of Liberia, have been identified as one of the 25 most important biodiversity hot spots on the planet, and what happened in Asia is a harbinger of what may happen here. As with any industrial-scale agricultural endeavor, the plantings have far-reaching impacts on both water supply and water quality—and, given the pesticides and other agrochemicals involved in growing oil palm, on the soil itself.
map by joe lemonnier
The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil provides only limited protection, with standards that lag far behind those of bodies like the Rainforest Alliance or the Forest Stewardship Council. It allows the use of the herbicide paraquat, for example, which has been banned in Europe because of its harmful effect on human health. Where endangered species are concerned, the roundtable suggests only that “their conservation be taken into account.” As for climate change, it merely “strongly encourages” members to “commit to a process” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The companies say that in the wake of the RSPO complaints they have taken numerous measures to set things straight. A Sime Darby official told me that the company has raised the price it pays local people for their destroyed crops, installed 37 hand pumps (though villagers said most of these had already broken down), helped to set up rice-farming plots in cleared swamp areas, and promised to work with the community to avoid destroying areas of cultural importance. GVL, for its part, has set aside 350 acres for the production of local crops, providing technical support, farming implements, and seeds.
The company continues to build worker housing and has completed three clinics. The two operations do provide a lot of jobs: GVL employs 2,200 people and Sime Darby 3,000. But those figures don’t come close to the numbers of people who have subsisted for generations on the 1.3 million acres that the plantations now occupy. Nor are there any safeguards in the agreements to ensure that jobs go to those who have lost their land. The lack of planting areas means that food now has to be brought in from elsewhere, at a cost that’s often out of reach for locals. (This in a country where, according to the government, fully 81 percent of the rural population suffers from hunger and malnutrition.) At the same time, traditional sources of income such as rubber tapping, hunting, and basketmaking have evaporated with the disappearance of the forests and swamplands that once supported them. In 2011, after the residents of Grand Cape Mount County filed their complaint against Sime Darby, Johnson Sirleaf called them out for trying to “undermine your own government,” saying that the constitution granted it alone the right to negotiate with foreign investors. But mounting discontent has forced her government to change its tune. By April 2013, the situation on the GVL plantation had become so fraught that the president flew there and acknowledged that mistakes had been made. “Before we signed that agreement,” she told the community in Sinoe, “we should have come and sat down with you. Now we want to fix it good for you, for the government, for the country, for the county.” “Even the government of Liberia does not have the capacity to negotiate with these conglomerates,” attorney Brownell told me. “The government budget this year was $500 million [$553 million, to be exact]. Sime Darby’s is more than $3 billion; Golden Veroleum’s, $1.6 billion. These companies have the top-notch lawyers in the world, the top-notch advisers. The government of Liberia is like an ant when it’s negotiating with these people.” To make matters worse, Brownell said in reference to the Sime Darby concession, there is little oversight to ensure that citizens’ needs are being met. “You don’t have any person from the government looking over it,” he said. “It’s a state within a state.” Sime Darby’s head of communications, Carl Dagenhart, speaking by phone from Malaysia, admitted that the company is largely left to its own devices. “Whenever an investor is doing business in a country which has been traumatized to such a degree as Liberia, of course, in many respects we will be a little bit on our own,” he said. Dagenhart added that Sime Darby’s investment had the potential to transform the Liberian economy. The company will build a refinery as winter 2013/2014
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early start By 7:00 a.m. each day, these women on the GVL plantation have reported for duty in their assigned work groups.
soon as it reaches some 250,000 acres of plantings, he told me. Nothing in the concession agreement requires the company to do so, however, and many doubt it will happen. Moving to such a value-added endeavor would require “additional investment and long-term commitment that the companies do not want to make,” SDI’s Siakor said. “We haven’t seen that happen in the timber industry, we haven’t seen it in the iron ore sector, and I don’t believe it’s going to be different for the palm oil sector.”
P
erhaps the most disturbing aspect of the
ongoing oil palm conflict, and of Liberia’s recent history more generally, is the way it has tarnished the image of President Johnson Sirleaf. In May the Liberian chapter of the watchdog organization Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative (EITI) issued a strongly critical report on the concessions. Between 2009 and 2011, it said, almost all of the $8 billion worth of resource contracts in the oil, forestry, mining, and agriculture sectors had been carried out in violation of Liberian law. (Of the 68 contracts studied, only six were deemed “compliant.”) GVL’s $1.6 billion project had been awarded without “any competitive bidding,” EITI charged, and Sime Darby had been able to nearly double its acreage without competitive bidding. This leaves the government with two options, said Siakor. “One, you cancel the concession agreements and redo them. Or two, you simply say, ‘We are aware that these were done unlawfully; therefore the contracts are illegal, but we will allow the companies to operate anyway.’” “Many of these lapses were human error,” Liberia’s minister of information, Lewis Brown, told me when asked about EITI’s charges of illegality. “People were incapable of administering these laws, first because they were new and second because they were complex. With the multitude of things she has to do, [Agriculture 5 4 onearth
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Minister Florence Chenoweth] probably forgot to file these certificates in that folder.” Johnson Sirleaf has also come under fire for nepotism, having appointed three of her four sons to prominent government positions—Fumba as head of the National Security Agency, Charles as deputy governor of the Central Bank, and Robert as key political adviser and president of the National Oil Company. (In response to widespread criticism, Robert resigned from both posts in September.) Last October, Leymah Gbowee, one of Johnson Sirleaf’s two co-laureates for the Nobel, publicly called out the president for nepotism and for failing to fight poverty and stepped down from her position as head of Liberia’s reconciliation commission. In April, in its annual report on human rights around the world, the U.S. Department of State said that Liberian officials “engaged in corrupt practices with impunity.” Those who have spoken out on environmental problems and government corruption say they have faced intimidation. In Kparn Yah Town, a village on the Firestone plantation, I had seen a badly polluted stream, a charcoal-colored sludge that stank of chemicals. When I inquired among the villagers, they told me they weren’t allowed to speak about it. A high-ranking official there confirmed that in March 2010, after the community had prepared a legal complaint about the situation, the president showed up and pleaded with them to withdraw it. She obliged them to sign a memorandum of understanding with the company that included a gag order. “It was written there,” one elder told me. “Never talk about the pollution. It is the law.” I also met with an activist who was imprisoned last year by Fumba Sirleaf’s National Security Agency after speaking out about the government’s failure to address the pollution at Firestone. He later fled the country and is seeking asylum abroad. (He requested anonymity out of concern for the safety of relatives in Liberia.) In August, Johnson Sirleaf’s government shut down the print op-
eration of FrontPage Africa, arguably the country’s most independent media outlet, and threw its publisher and managing editor, Rodney Sieh, into prison for failing to pay damages on a libel charge stemming from a story the paper had run about corruption in the agriculture ministry. When asked about this, Brown, the information minister, again insisted that I look at these events in the context of Liberia’s history. Pressed on the State Department’s comments on corruption, he responded with a belly laugh. “Yes, there is corruption here and there,” he said, “but we’re talking about a part of the world where corruption is perceived as second nature.” I would likely be reading more on the subject, he added, “because of the expansive nature of freedom we have in the country, especially freedom of the press.” So why was Rodney Sieh in jail? I asked. The government would like to see him released, Brown answered, but “cannot afford to meddle in judicial matters.” As for critics like Alfred Brownell and Silas Siakor, home cooking This farmer’s crop he described them as “fairly of palm nuts will be credible people” and “conpounded into the structive partners” who had fiery-hued butter that is a staple of a role to play in the ongoLiberian cuisine. ing negotiations over the oil palm plantations. But the attitude I encountered among local government officials in Liberia was considerably different. The conflict over the GVL concession was all Brownell’s fault, said Milton Teajay, the Johnson Sirleaf–appointed superintendent of Sinoe County. “I know about five persons who have been agitating and who have been propping up rebellion against GVL,” he said. And Alan Gbowee, the superintendent of Gparpolu County, where Sime Darby is hoping to expand its operations, said his problem was that SDI was “trying to incite people against development.” Both officials sought to minimize it, but anger at the concessions was palpable wherever I traveled. In Totoquelle, a village in Gparpolu County that is slated for development by Sime Darby, the chief, Emmanuel Jangebah, even raised the specter of violent resistance. “If we see bulldozers in the bush,” he told me, “we will take our machetes and run to meet them.”
L
and grabs have already led to violence
elsewhere in Africa. In April 2012 five workers on an Ethiopian project run by a Saudi agribusiness company were shot dead in a dispute over land rights. The year before, two civilians in Senegal were killed after state security forces were deployed in response to protests. And in 2009, a deal involving the leasing of more than two million acres to the South Korean company Daewoo Logistics contributed to the overthrow of the government of Madagascar. Liberian groups like SDI and Green Advocate are doing their best
to head off similar scenarios. They have begun using GPS to map the communities slated for plantations, and they continue to call on the government to reconsider its approach to the concession agreements, suggesting, for instance, that lease payments be made directly to the affected communities. “I don’t see that it’s possible to stop [land grabs],” José Graziano da Silva, the head of the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization, told Britain’s Guardian newspaper last year. “We can’t wish them away, but we have to find a proper way of limiting them. It appears to be like the Wild West,” he added, “and we need a sheriff and law in place.” In May, after three years of discussions, the Committee on World Food Security, a division of the FAO, adopted guidelines calling for government transparency about land deals and better consultation with local communities. The directives are purely voluntary, however, and risk, in the words of Olivier de Schutter, the U.N.’s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, “providing policy makers with a checklist of how to destroy global peasantry responsibly.” Siakor and Brownell both suggested to me that outsiders might have a role to play. In recent years, companies like KFC and Cadbury have begun replacing the palm oil in their products for the Australian market in response to an outcry over the ingredient’s environmental impact in Indonesia. And last April, Unilever—now the single-biggest buyer of palm oil in the world— pledged to purchase all of its oil from traceable, sustainable sources by 2020. “Consumers in the West need to be told that they also share responsibility,” Siakor said. “Their consumption is driving the demand.” In the end, if Liberia is to avoid falling victim yet again to the resource curse, if the fruits of its natural bounty are to benefit the lives of its four million citizens, the key question will be how the country is led. At a meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative in New York in September, President Bill Clinton told the audience that while foreign companies in the developing world have an obligation to conduct themRead Jocelyn C. Zuckerman’s selves ethically, it is governments that column on food and agriculture ultimately determine the fate of their at onearth.org/futureoffood nations. Nearly every Liberian I spoke with expressed growing impatience with the country’s leadership. With four years remaining in her final term, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf has the time to set things right. Whether she has the will is another question.
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Jocelyn C. Zuckerman is a contributing editor to OnEarth. Her story about urban agriculture in Africa appeared in the Winter 2011/2012 issue. winter 2013/2014
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Reviews
wordsimagesideas
junkyard planet Travels in the BillionDollar Trash Trade by adam minter Bloomsbury, 304 pp., $26
our most surprising export
A Flickr Vision/Getty Images
It’s a dirty job, but someone has to do it. And remarkably, that’s a good thing. by elizabeth royte
dam Minter grew up in the scrap business, watching his father
haggle with Minnesota street peddlers and hearing stories of his great-uncle bashing apart small motors to recover their copper. Now a Shanghai-based reporter for two magazines covering the global scrap industry, Minter asks Americans to reconsider their assumptions about recycling, revealing the gritty reality of a business that exists primarily to provide materials to markets hungry for resources at the best available price. This is, as you may have guessed, mostly a story about Chinese demand and first-world supply. In 2012 the United States exported more than 46 million metric tons of scrap metal, paper, rubber, and plastic. (Scrap has been America’s number one export, by value, to China for several years running, though it was bested in 2012 by record soybean sales.) Historically, these materials stayed in this country, to be reworked into new consumer products or, in the absence of markets, abandoned, landfilled, or burned. But rising labor costs, in concert with tighter environmental regulations and the constrained economy, gradually closed the vast majority of U.S. manufacturing plants. On the other side of the world, meanwhile, China was rapidly industrializing. You can’t build highways, railroads, factories, and skyscrapers without an abundance of metals. China’s insatiable demand, coupled with willing hordes of low-cost laborers, lax environmental regulations, few import duties, and discounted
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shipping rates on “backhauls” from the United States to Asia (filling ships that would otherwise go back empty), conspired to turn China into the world’s biggest consumer of steel, copper, aluminum, lead, gold, silver, palladium, zinc, platinum, and rare earth elements. China is now the number one importer of American metals, plastics, and paper. Minter has nothing but admiration for how the scrap trade has globalized. The industry “turns over as much as $500 billion annually” and employs more people than any other industry on earth except agriculture. He tours Wen’an County in Hebei Province, formerly bucolic farmland, where 20,000 mom-and-pop shops now wash, sort, and melt plastics derived from car bumpers, baskets, and crates. Workers send home wages that in turn send children to school. Roads get paved, buildings rise. But Wen’an is also choked by traffic, polymer fumes, and grime, its young workers succumbing to pulmonary fibrosis and paralyzing strokes. Minter revels in presenting such paradoxes. Overall, he reminds us, this industrial-scale recycling is good for the earth. It keeps stuff out of landfills (135 million metric tons of material in 2012), and it prevents the mining or extraction of natural resources (oil and natural gas, in the case of the plastics). To get your hands on one ton of virgin copper requires processing 100 tons of ore, an energyintensive process that rips up vast landscapes, contaminates waterways, and leaves sulfuric
acid in its wake. As Minter says, after visiting a copper mine in Minnesota, why would anyone mine this metal when “there’s an endless supply of perfectly recyclable and reusable copper—worth billions!—available in the junkyards and recycling bins of America?” (The scrap may be here, but the means of transforming it aren’t: the last U.S. copper smelter shut down in 2000, and China is now home to the largest copper refining industry in the world. Why, you may be asking, is copper such a big deal? It’s essential in hybrid motors and wind turbines, and in transmitting information and energy, to name just a few of its uses.) Minter travels far and wide, traipsing through trash heaps in India, the Middle East, Africa, Brazil, Taiwan, and beyond. He describes piles in scrapyards, piles in warehouses, piles in the front yards of shacks. He watches, awestruck, as a million-dollar machine in Indiana pulverizes cars into streams of ferrous and nonferrous metals, plastics, and glass, and he marvels as thousands of low-wage laborers in Asia unwind copper wires from small electric motors and hack the aluminum from discarded water meters. At another workshop, he observes gloved hands sorting through “fingernail-sized flecks” of metal and tossing them into buckets. “Each piece, on its own, is nothing; each bucket is little more than nothing; but weeks and days of so much nothing can add up to millions of dollars,” Minter writes. The recycling of Christmas tree lights exemplifies the value of hand work and diverse markets: American scrappers gather the plastic- or rubber-coated wires, and when enough are accumulated, they are baled up and sold to Chinese importers, who in turn sell them to processors who pay workers to strip the strands and extract the copper. (Some companies even find a use for the discarded insulation: it goes into the
soles of slippers.) The margin on these goods is often pennies, but handle 10 million pounds a year and . . . you get the picture. Junkyard Planet is an affirmation of the transformative power of capitalism. As waste travels the world, economies grow, livelihoods improve, and stuff that looks like “borderline trash” morphs into crucial raw materials. After a decade on his beat, Minter has dozens of Chinese banquets’ worth of contacts to support this narrative. However, while he dines and travels with the captains of industry, he spends no time with the people wearing the work gloves after they leave their posts in factories and shops. To be sure,
f r o m
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fumes and acids: food security and safety, for example. But aren’t all these things connected? Minter doesn’t linger on these issues. If Americans are worried about the well-being of plastics workers, he suggests they think twice about buying disposable plastics in the first place, then urge corporations that use recycled plastic in their packaging to seek less-polluting suppliers. Prohibiting the export of plastics to Wen’an or electronics to Guiyu, a town criticized by eco-activists for lax health and safety standards, won’t improve conditions for laborers, Minter says. But raising their standard of living will. Minter has great affection for
and mills hungry for more plastics, paper, metals, and electronic waste—may wish this activity happened closer to home, but Minter explains carefully why it does not. Of course there are downsides to the global scrap trade, beyond its carbon footprint and the outsourcing of jobs. It can be difficult to track where things end up, who is handling them, and how. This is especially important when considering plastics and electronic waste, which involve so many toxic materials and processes. Yes, oversight of environmental and human health impacts should be much tighter, but responsibly repurposing, refurbishing, and recycling these goods is, on the whole, far
c o n t r i b u t o r s
Oil and Honey By Bill McKibben, Times Books, 272 pp., $26 one day bill mcKIBBEN WILL GET THE BIOGRAPHY HE DESERVES. Precociously gifted, he arrived at the New Yorker magazine in 1982, straight from the Harvard Crimson. In 1989 he published The End of Nature, the first book to galvanize public awareness of the perils of climate change. Since then he has written about everything from religion and genetic engineering to the limitations of the growth economy. His work has graced many of the country’s finest magazines, including OnEarth, where he is a contributing editor. Along the way he has also become the country’s best-known environmental activist, most recently through his leadership of the campaign against the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. His latest book, Oil and Honey, combines an account of his fight to end our addiction to fossil fuels with his enduring love of the small and the local—in this case the passion of a Vermont beekeeper.
Minter observes dangerous work- this much-maligned industry. And place conditions, but he doesn’t who can resist the archetypal apask laborers how those conditions peal of spinning mountains of affect them personally. There’s an gold from endless streams of assumption here that the workers, straw? Like an exploded-view many of whom labored on farms diagram, Junkyard Planet illufor subsistence wages before pro- minates how this system moves cessing facilities pushed them off massive amounts of material to the land, are better off today. As a manufacturers who will make use researcher with China’s Ministry of it, diminishes demand for minof Environmental Protection told ing and drilling, and lifts millions the author, Chinese workers have from poverty along the way. Proponents of relomore pressing calization—and problems Read more about China getting tough than illness on the recycling and scrap business at the owners of onearth.org/greenfence domestic plants triggered by
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better for the planet than the alternative: incinerating or burying them, and then extracting new materials in order to make more. Refurbishing used electronics, a significant part of the global trade in e-waste, also provides low-cost devices to millions who would otherwise go without. One might wish that recycling didn’t enable planned obsolescence, or spur the production and consumption of consumer goods bound, in short order, to be landfilled, or let producers off the hook for generating excessive and
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reviews disposable packaging. But the process also produces valuable and essential goods, stuff that developed nations aren’t going to give up and developing nations want their share of. It’s easy to rue the despoliation of Wen’an and vow to consume less—Minter actually
suggests this—but at least the American detergent bottles and bumpers piled up there will be incorporated into new goods, unlike the stuff that never gets collected for recycling in the first place. Junkyard Planet is an often startling look at a secret world of grubbers and scrappers, men and machines. Yes, it contains contradictions, and Minter’s assumption
that American tree-huggers are clueless about why and how recycling happens can be irritating. But his central message is solid: those grubbers and scrappers are essential if we’re going to continue consuming and disposing at anything like the current rate.
gold The Race for the World’s Most Seductive Metal BY matthew hart Simon and Schuster 304 pp., $26
Contributing editor Elizabeth Royte is the author of Garbage Land.
The subtitle of Matthew
spotlight
Petrochemical America By Richard Misrach and Kate Orff, Aperture, $80 Along “Cancer Alley,” the 150-mile river corridor between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, a Dow Chemical complex looms over the Holy Rosary Cemetery in the town of Taft, refinery flares light up the night, and antebellum mansions serve as corporate offices for the likes of Shell Chemical. The photographer Richard Misrach began documenting Cancer Alley in 1998, but Petrochemical America, which contains some 50 of his images, is much more than a conventional photo book. The landscape architect Kate Orff, who specializes in the regeneration of blighted industrial areas, broadens the lens to explore the radical remaking of the human and natural environment of southern Louisiana. Where once there were bayous and fertile farmlands, she writes, “We have designed a new nature,” creating “a colossal, smoking ‘back of house’ for the American dream.”
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Hart’s new book might have benefited from an added phrase. Gold is not only “the world’s most seductive metal”; it’s also the most useless. The task Hart has set himself in writing Gold is to explore the reasons why humankind is so obsessed with a metal that has proved to have few industrial applications and for the past several thousand years has been used mainly to make lavish pieces of art as tributes to the gods, living and dead. The real influence of this useless metal on the global economy began in the 1500s, when Spain flooded European markets with gold plundered from the Aztec and Inca empires. More recently, in the era of the gold standard, gold bricks backed the currencies of most industrial nations. But in 1971, when President Richard Nixon separated the value of the dollar from the bricks in our vaults, gold was sidelined as a primary economic player. Instead, it found a niche in hedge markets with investors looking for alternatives to the dollar during economic downturns. For the general public it once again became the metal of bling. But then an unprecedented gold rush began, accelerated by the 2008
financial crisis. The frenzy peaked in 2011, when gold sold for almost $2,000 an ounce, up from $300 a decade earlier. More gold has been mined in the past 10 years than in the previous 6,000. Hart, the author of Diamond and a former contributing editor to the New York trade magazine Rapaport Diamond, takes us on a fascinating global journey from the gold fields of China, the world’s leading producer, to one of the deepest man-made holes on earth, the Mponeng mine outside Johannesburg. There he drops 1.6 miles in four minutes, into the bowels of the planet, where “4,000 men vanish into a subterranean web of shafts, ore chutes, and haulage tunnels.” But there’s more. In parallel tunnels and shafts an even more intriguing labor force is at work: an army of thieves, “ghost miners” who sometimes hide for weeks at a time in the darkness, waiting for a chance to get their gold dust aboveground undetected by the mine’s sophisticated security systems. Beyond fleeting references to horrors like the use of mercury in small-scale artisanal mines and the vast amounts of cyanide used in industrial-scale mining operations, Hart has disappointingly little to say about the environmental impact of the modernday gold rush. The frenzy to get more gold to market has only exacerbated the scale and destructiveness of the industry. For instance, the owners of the Grasberg mine in the Indonesian province of West Papua, which sits at 14,000 feet in the highest mountain range between the Himalayas and the Andes, have racked up countless environmental abuses in pursuit of the world’s biggest known gold reserves, including the creation of a 30-mile-long acidic plume that flows into the Arafura Sea. Unfortunately, Hart is more interested in the actors driving the recent boom—the bankers,
hedge fund billionaires, and national treasuries—than he is in its victims. Even so, his final message rings true. Gold’s real significance, he says, is as an indicator of the role that fear plays in the human psyche. While gold enthusiasts often say things like “For peace of mind, buy gold,” Hart argues that in reality “gold is never peaceful. It’s a fever spread by doubt... Gold is inseparable from speculation about disaster, misfeasance, or manipulation.” So the next time Glenn Beck or Sean Hannity implores you to buy gold, here’s a tip: don’t. —BILL CARTER
trees in paradise A California History BY jared farmer Nor ton, 592 pp., $35
When we think of Cali-
fornia, trees are probably not the first things that come to mind. The stereotypes run more to sun, surfers, and Hollywood. In Trees in Paradise, Jared Farmer snubs these conventional icons to view the history of the state from its tree canopy. We see forest crowns as the forty-niners found them. We meet the species they and their successors introduced to California and watch the demise of many of them, as well as of their native predecessors. Starting his story in 1848 with
the discovery of gold, Farmer combines biology, commerce, and mythology to describe the transformation of the state’s brown, largely treeless landscape through millions upon millions of plantings. The planters came for the California Dream, and when the landscape didn’t meet their expectations, they changed it.
[
passed through cycles of popularity, like the world of Southern California fashion they have come to symbolize. Today, Farmer says, they are the signature trees of Los Angeles, “a city built on advertising, a city that promises everyone a makeover.” In short, the new landscape is no paradise. For each of his cho-
]
Eucalyptus is an Australian species, yet with its aromatic leaves evoking emotions of belonging, it seems as old as California civilization itself
Trees in Paradise focuses on redwoods, eucalyptus, citrus, and palms. Notably, three of the four are non-native to California, and this alone makes one of Farmer’s primary points: for all the imagination and energy of the planters, for all the horticultural expertise they developed, for all the creative genius they applied to selling their concept of California, the underlying beauty of the state is in its brown, unplanted land. Farmer starts with the giant sequoias of the Sierra Nevada and their coastal cousins, which played a seminal role in both forest exploitation and preservation. “This is the place that inspired the most naked form of American acquisitiveness and this is the place that first inspired Americans to set aside national reserves,” he writes. Paradoxes like this r un throughout his narrative. The eucalyptus, an Australian native, is a fire-prone species, yet with its aromatic leaves evoking emotions of belonging, it now seems as old as California civilization itself. Its introduction, Farmer concludes, was a beautiful mistake. The “Orange Empire,” meanwhile, is a paragon of California business and biological innovation. Its ups and downs have as much to do with “horticapitalism” as they do with unexpected night frosts and a shortage of water. Palms have
sen trees, Farmer combines a thorough botanical background with an in-depth explanation of the cultural forces that enhanced and detracted from its success. Eucalyptus, citrus, and palms each enjoyed a tide of unbridled enthusiasm that swelled with their commercial potential and ebbed as their novelty faded and the realities of climate set in. By focusing on these four iconic trees, Farmer ignores the vast arc of conifer forests that rise from the central Sierra Nevada, stretching north to the Oregon border and west to the Pacific. These native ecosystems have never attracted the cultural imagination in the same way and, perhaps as a result, remain largely intact. Though Farmer can sometimes be overly pedagogical, Trees in Paradise is a compelling work, from its description of the ghastly treatment of sequoias, “simultaneously degraded and sacralized,” to its evocation of the sweet-scented splendor of orange groves blooming in the dusk of a Pasadena suburb. Is the Golden State better off for all the trees that now cover its once-barren hills? Farmer is equivocal. But for this Californian at least, one thing is sure: the state’s planted landscape will never look quite the same. —JANE BRAXTON LITTLE
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Dispatches news and views from the natural resources defense council
good enough to eat?
An NRDC/Harvard report calls for a better system of dating food.
those edibles are fresher than you think A new study reveals that a deeply flawed system of labeling results in millions of tons of wasted food
T
he next time you decide not to take
home your restaurant leftovers or feel like throwing out those uneaten containers of Greek yogurt, you may want to reflect on the 160 billion pounds of food discarded annually by U.S. households, supermarkets, restaurants, and cafeterias. The retail value of all that tossed food: $165 billion. The average American family tosses out 15 percent to 25 percent of the food it purchases—several thousand dollars’ worth per year. A major cause of all this waste is an epidemic misunderstanding of food labels exacerbated by a lack of federal regulation, according to a recent NRDC report, The Dating Game: How Confusing Food Date Labels Lead to Food Waste in America. Produced in conjunction with the Harvard Food Law and Policy Clinic, the new report builds upon
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NRDC’s 2012 study Wasted, which detailed the inefficiencies of the U.S. food system. The Dating Game goes further, providing a history of food labeling and a summary of current laws, as well as offering recommendations to decrease food loss. Because federal labeling laws are loose, states and even cities can create their own regulations: Baltimore’s laws, for example, differ from those of the state of Maryland. Businesses around the country label packages with such phrases as “sell by,” “use by,” “best by,” and “enjoy by,” with little consistency as to their meaning. Consumers frequently interpret the labels as expiration dates, but typically that’s not the case; often they indicate peak quality or—as with “sell by” dates—convey recommendations to retailers about keeping their shelves freshly stocked. “It’s hard to educate consumers about what labels mean when they don’t have a consistent meaning,” says Dana
opposite: VIVEK PRAKASH/Reuters/Corbis; right: Ron Sanford/Science Source; top right: Thomas alleman
Gunders, a staff scientist with NRDC’s food and agriculture program, who contributed to the report. “The biggest problem is that consumers think the labels are about food safety, when in fact they’re not.” Food waste, Gunders points out, has immense environmental impact. Agriculture, which accounts for more than half of the nation’s land use and 80 percent of its water use, is the country’s largest emitter of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas with 300 times the warming effect of CO2. And once food is discarded in landfills, its decomposition contributes 15 percent of U.S. emissions of methane, another major source of greenhouse gas pollution. To reduce food waste and its environmental consequences, Gunders calls for consumer education, such as explanatory store signage; industry action; and increased federal regulation. In the wake of the two NRDC reports, she adds, there has been new congressional interest in legislation to improve food labeling. The NRDC/Harvard study offers a range of recommendations for a clearer, more uniform labeling system: for example, replacing “sell by” dates with “best by” dates for consumers, packaging certain foods with “freeze by” dates, and adding safe-handling instructions to food packages. (For practical tips on reducing food waste in the home, visit nrdc. org/food/expiration-dates.asp.) Discarding less food, notes Gunders, would have a global impact. Consider the world in 2050: we will need to feed several billion more people at a time when agricultural production may be compromised by changing climate conditions, diminished water supplies, and a decrease in arable land. “If we consume more of the food that we produce,” she says, “we could offset the need for more agricultural land and resources.” —Brianna Elliott
Safer fishing Do you enjoy a plate of fish
sticks or a salmon burger from time to time? Well, there’s a good chance they were made from fish that entered the country illegally. The Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) mandates that all imported fish be accompanied by proof that it was caught using methods no more harmful to marine mammals such as dolphins and whales than those used by U.S. fishers. Unfortunately, the National Marine Fisheries Service has never enforced the law, so local fishers who comply with the MMPA, investing in technology
that helps protect marine mammals and collecting data to submit to the Fisheries Service, are at a disadvantage when competing with foreign fisheries for the lucrative U.S. market. In NRDC’s upcoming report Net Loss: The Killing of Marine Mammals in Foreign Fisheries, staff attorney Zak Smith explains that in many parts of the world fisheries are regulated and monitored poorly, if at all. Many countries can’t provide data on the number of marine mammals harmed during fishing, leaving the service unable to assess if foreign fishers are violating the law. “We need to enforce the law,” Smith says, “protect threatened populations, and level the playing field for U.S. fishers.” Foreign fisheries would then have to provide data about fishing methods, or find their products banned from the U.S. market. —N.S.
Water Blight
Los Angeles River runoff fouls beaches.
Clean up your Water, L.A.!
H
ere’s what you don’t know about all those
shimmering, glamorous beaches in Los Angeles: after a major rainfall, residents of the county are often warned to stay away from these sun-kissed, sandy paradises, sometimes for up to three days. Why? Because when rainwater hits roads and pavements, it washes away dirt, debris, and nasty toxins, carrying them for miles through the county’s storm drain system. By the time all of it is dumped into the sea, the rainwater contains a toxic stew of pollutants that may include mercury, arsenic, lead, and fecal bacteria. For years this pollution has gone largely unchecked. So in 2008, NRDC and the Los Angeles Waterkeeper sued Los Angeles County for violations of the federal Clean Water Act. Earlier this year the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with NRDC and held the county liable for pollution of the San Gabriel and Los Angeles rivers. “Stormwater is the number one cause of beach-water pollution in Southern California, and L.A. County is the largest polluter,” says Steve Fleischli, a senior attorney who directs NRDC’s water program. Indeed, an NRDC report found that 28 percent of beach closings in the nation were due to stormwater runoff pollution. When the case first went to the Ninth Circuit in 2011, the county argued that it could not be held responsible for polluted runoff in the rivers because some of it may have been generated by cities and industry. After losing its case, the county appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, where NRDC senior attorney Aaron Colangelo presented oral arguments before the justices. The nation’s highest court decided to send the case back down to the Ninth Circuit, which then ruled in favor of NRDC a second time. While these court decisions are encouraging, Fleischli says the legal battle is not over. The details of how the county will address runoff pollution must still be decided back in district court. Moreover, additional county appeals could further delay implementation of what Fleischli notes are fairly simple solutions: for instance, installing green infrastructure that can capture, filter, or treat runoff before it is released into the sea. Despite the legal tangles ahead, Fleischli says, “the Ninth Circuit reached the right result both times. We don’t think it warrants another review.” If he’s correct, L.A. County must finally get to work improving water quality and public health. That would be —Naveena Sadasivam a real victory for everyone.
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TRUTH SQUAD
Dam a Pristine River? No Way.
T
he Alaska Energy Authority is pushing to build the second-tallest hydropower
dam in the United States on the Susitna River. The project would create a 42-mile-long reservoir, flooding approximately 24,000 acres of wilderness. It would also threaten the river’s economically and culturally significant salmon runs as well as the habitat of such iconic Alaskan wildlife as brown and black bears, moose, caribou, wolves, and bald eagles. Two experts in NRDC’s water program, senior scientist MONTY SCHMITT and staff attorney NOAH GARRISON, call out numerous inaccuracies in a recent AEA brochure promoting the proposed project.
Giving for Life Growing up on a farm, Laura
1. Susitna-Watana Hydro will ena ble Alaska to achieve its goal of providing 50 percent of its electrical energy from renewa ble sources by 2025. Don’t need a dam for that!
! W e’ re sk ep ti c al
2. Only one salmon species has been documented
within 35 miles of the projec t site.
3. Susitna-Watana Hydro will hel p diversify Alaska’s energy portfolio and decrease our N o t re al ly dependence on fossil fuels. 4. [The project would create] an estimated 1,000 jobs during construction phase and 20 full-time jobs…to maintain and operate the facility once completed.
* Roughly half of all states in the country do not consider large hydropower projects such as the proposed Susitna dam “renewable,” and rightfully so: large dams damage healthy river systems and the fish and wildlife that inhabit them.
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* Even if this were
true (studies cited to support the project are widely viewed as flawed), Chinook salmon are vital to the region’s commercial and sportfishing industries and overall economy. The dam’s effects on Chinook and four other salmon species downstream of the proposed site would be devastating.
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* Alaska already gets
21 percent of its energy from hydropower, so this project wouldn’t diversify the state’s energy. Instead, the $5.2 billion cost of the dam could detract from Alaska’s renewable energy coffers, undermining efforts to increase wind, tidal, and geothermal power.
*A 2009 report by the
University of Alaska Anchorage found that healthy fisheries in the Susitna region already generate up to $64 million in personal income and support up to 1,900 sportfishing jobs. Building the dam could actually result in negative economic impact and job losses.
Chenel appreciated the interconnectedness of humans and animals, especially farm animals. From her earliest days, she felt kinship with every living thing. That strong connection continued through her professional life, when Chenel became the first U.S. commercial producer of goat cheese. Over the years, she has made many gifts to NRDC, and in 2013 joined a trip to Baja to see the ancient habitat of gray whales, which was protected from industrial development by an NRDC campaign. Chenel describes it as “a life-changing experience” and an opportunity to experience firsthand the results of the organization’s work. “NRDC fights the good fight for those of us unable to do so as individuals,” she says. “I’m especially impressed by its effective use of litigation.” When she sold her company, Chenel began to consider her legacy. “I wanted to go beyond my business success, to do something more far-reaching,” she says, “to leave a legacy that could benefit the diversity of life on our planet.” She decided to include a bequest to NRDC in her will. Chenel sees her bequest as a statement of her values and as another way of protecting the earth. “I can sleep better,” she says, “knowing my resources will make a difference.” 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
capital improvements
Douglass Sims steers money and political will toward green projects.
getting to yes A seasoned deal maker helps governments and institutions find the profitability in sustainability
Heather Greer
A
by kristen french
s a teenager in the 1970s, Douglass
Sims watched closely as his father, an executive at Johnson & Johnson, worked to make medicine and health-care products more widely available in Africa. Later, after getting a philosophy degree and a law degree, Sims went to work for a British law firm, where he oversaw the financing of infrastructure and energy projects in Africa and Latin America. His life experience and education had equipped him to understand, better than many, the complex ways in which planetary, social, and individual health are interrelated—and the work he was doing certainly seemed tailor-made for a young, socially engaged attorney. But as he scoured one environmental disclosure statement after
who we are
what we do
another, Sims began to grow hydro and wind—could yield commore and more uneasy. Many of parable amounts of energy while the projects he was facilitating, having far less impact on Chile’s the data clearly showed, were natural treasures than megacontaminating the water, air, and projects like HidroAysén or a proearth in ways that would only end posed series of new coal mines. The conventional wisdom in up further impoverishing the lives of the very people he was trying Chile had long held that such alternatives were too expensive. to help. “I had been focused on asking, “We showed that they weren’t,” ‘How do you increase people’s in- Sims says, “and it blew everycomes?’” Sims says. “But I began body’s mind.” The same impulse to marshal to see that there are different kinds of poverty, including the quality-of- innovation for the betterment of life poverty that comes from not people’s lives and environments led Sims to take on a project living in a healthy environment.” Determined to approach the back home in New York. He has issue holistically, Sims joined played an important role in the NRDC in 2010 as a senior finance creation of the New York Green specialist for energy projects. To- Bank, a state-managed financial day he works in the organization’s institution dedicated to increasinternational program and its ing investment in clean-energy Center for Market Innovation technologies. Scheduled to open (CMI), which aims to redirect for business in 2014, the bank will capital toward sustainable busi- be staffed by clean-energy investnesses. Now he draws from that ment experts. With his former same well of experience and ex- CMI colleague Greg Hale, Sims pertise to find new ways of making presented the idea to Governor clean energy affordable—and, yes, Andrew Cuomo’s staff in 2012, profitable—in both the develop- and over the course of the year provided input and ing and the develVisit switchboard.nrdc.org/ advice that influoped worlds. blogs/dsims for more on global enced the goverMuch of what green-energy infrastructure nor’s decision to Sims does at CMI takes the form of demonstrating to endorse the project—and, ultigovernments and investors that mately, to commit $1 billion of sustainable investments are both seed capital to make it a reality. Sims hopes that the New York environmentally sound and economically wise. In Chile, he has Green Bank will become a model promoted cost-effective renewable for other banks in other states. If alternatives to HidroAysén, the it does, it will serve to reinforce hydroelectric dam megaproject his abiding belief that social, that, if completed, could cause ir- economic, and environmental reversible environmental damage progress are structurally conand disrupt local communities. nected—and that success needn’t With NRDC colleague Amanda be viewed as a zero-sum game in Maxwell, Sims has shown how which one can win only if somea low-impact portfolio of energy body else is losing. “It’s about making everybody efficiency and renewable-energy technologies—such as solar, prosper,” he says, “by making the biomass, geothermal, and small pie bigger.”
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open space DANCING WITH THE STARS “Oh, that’s a good sign,” Mike said, pointing to a splash of white son over lichen-colored rock and fallen trees tangled with feces on rock. “Neat,” I said, and then, “Oh!” Right behind him, 20 feet away, dark grapevine. Mike carried a box of white laboratory mice, the protocol being to offer up to four mice, one at a time, to any round eyes in a disk-shaped face were staring down at us, the expression Mexican spotted owl we happened to see in this narrow singularly judgmental, the short curved beak a comic afterthought. White canyon in the Gila National Forest of southwestern New and brown breast feathers ruffled in a mottled, mesmerizing pattern, and, Mexico. If that owl were to swoop down, grab the mouse, and eat it on mesmerized, I stared back, waiting for the bird to fly away. Soon—like some incompetent pathe spot, it probably did not have hungry parazzo—I was fumbling for my camnestlings nearby. But if the owl were to era. “These birds are so fearless,” Mike swoop down, grab the mouse, and take stage-whispered. “I’ve never worked her prey away—and if we were to track with a species that cares so little about the flap of those chestnut-colored wings the human presence.” In the next two through ponderosa pine, following that hours, we would watch the female suddenly flying mouse—then we might swoop down and take two of the live discover a nest of piteously ugly and white mice that Mike’s son had placed relatively rare Mexican spotted owlets on top of a jutting tree branch. The mice (Strix occidentalis lucida). seemed puzzled but not alarmed to be It all sounded improbable to me. But out of the box, whiskers moving, sniffMike is a gifted naturalist, and the U.S. ing at this brave new world. (Yes, I had government was paying him to camp some feelings for the mice, which I supout, hoot between dusk and dawn, pressed.) Directly under the female owl, wait for answering hoots, and confirm I watched as she swallowed whole her the location of any breeding pairs of first offering, the gulp and throat moveMexican spotted owls. One of those ment both casual and awkward. The pairs frequented this canyon, where male joined us within a half hour and Douglas fir grew along the rocky botalso swooped down for two of the mice. tom; where the sky had darkened now Giddy with this unexpected gift, I to a cobalt river above our heads; and felt as if I’d met my favorite environwhere the scale was intimate, nothing mental celebrity. It was as though this grand, the original feng shui. couple had welcomed us into their livWith a wingspan of about 45 inches, “These birds are so fearless,” ing room, hospitable hosts eating our this medium-size owl is one of three Mike stage-whispered. “I’ve never plate of canapés, swiveling their heads, subspecies of spotted owl, each preworked with a species that cares so blinking their eyes. Hello, hello? ferring to nest in healthy, old-growth Then the female flew with her secforests. Listed as threatened under the little about the human presence.” ond mouse down the canyon to a crevEndangered Species Act in 1993, the Mexican spotted owl quickly became a scapegoat in the Southwest iced cliff face, and suddenly we were scrambling after her, running back for an unsustainable logging industry already in decline, much like the way we had come. Full stop! Panting! We craned our necks and the Northern spotted owl in the Pacific Northwest. The controversy hoped this rocky crevice, 30 feet up, sheltered her nest. Alternately, there inspired bumper stickers: i like spotted owls—fried. Or, save a it might simply be a cache—a storage area for white laboratory mice. Since we couldn’t see or hear young birds, Mike suspected the latter. logger—kill a spotted owl. Under new federal regulations, logging Meanwhile, the cobalt river above our heads had become a night practices changed, and eventually the anti-owl sentiment was replaced by other rural concerns. But the spotted owls are still threatened by full of stars. The 9-year-old did a little dance, the beam of his flashlight climate change in the form of extended drought and increased wildfire, illuminating the path home. as well as by predation by other owls. In the United States, an estimated 2,000 Mexican spotted owls remain (there are far fewer in Mexico). Sharman Apt Russell is a contributing editor to OnEarth. followed my friend Mike and his 9-year-old
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illustration by keith negley
I
b y shar m an a p t r u sse l l
Photo © Susanne Weissenberger/White Mountain Photography
Take the NRDC Legacy Challenge Let us know you’re including NRDC in your estate plans and a member of our Board of Trustees will contribute up to $10,000 to help save wildlife and wildlands! You’ll be protecting our natural heritage right now and for generations to come. If NRDC already has a place in your plans, please let us know so that we can take advantage of this wonderful opportunity.
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