How saving salmon can save humans
A Survival Guide for the Planet • published by the natural resources defense council
L.A. rides the wave Angelenos say “later” Los Angeles says “later” to gridlock, sprawl, and squandered squanderedwater water
summer 2013 w w w.one arth.org
PLUS
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tweeting the revolution grand slam in seattle india’s forests, fires, and funerals
contents
Onearth magazine
volume 35 number 2 summer 2013
FEATURE S
38 Grand Slam In Seattle
d e p a r t m ent s cover story
28
Despite government budget cuts, Canada’s Banff National Park is still a magical place in springtime.
by Jeff Grunewald
The Seattle Mariners may not win baseball’s World Series any
17 FRONTLINES
time soon, but they lead the
The hydrogen revolution has been just around the corner for more than 100 years. Is it finally here? Plus the joys of living small, and more.
major leagues in the campaign to green professional sports.
Q&A Ted Genoways interviews novelist Louise Erdrich as she takes her passion for the environment to the streets of Washington.
40 Come Back by Barry Yeoman
A rich human community of
24 the synthesist
fishers, farmers, and foodies
by Alan Burdick Naturespace makes all previous audio technologies seem as obsolete as the buggy whip. On with the headphones!
relies on California’s salmon runs. After years of decline, both the fish and the people may be staging a comeback.
26 think again
48 Sacred Fire Photographs by Agnès Dherbeys Story by George Black
In the city of Varanasi, on the banks of the Ganges, ancient Hindu traditions collide with
Keep growing, keep driving, and let the future take care of itself. Angelenos are at long last seeing the error of their ways and taking a very different view of their city—and themselves.
the need to preserve India’s disappearing forests and clean up its holiest river.
insid e nr dc
10 view from nrdc by Frances Beinecke
12 the deans list thomas alleman
by Bob Deans
60 dispatches
Doing an end run around Congress; gagging on fracking; and more.
8 From the Editor 14 WHERE ONEARTH
L.A. Takes the High Road by Jeff Turrentine
The City of Angels has gone by a few other names over the years: the city of water theft, the city of gridlock, the city of sprawl. Now, as climate change has introduced a Hollywood-style ticking clock to the story, the plot has thickened. It will take some creative thinking to save Los Angeles. Fortunately, creativity’s not in short supply here.
Cover: Photograph by Thomas Alleman
by Will Oremus Today’s protest movements don’t need a soundtrack by Dylan. The times they have a-changed.
56 reviews
The problem with rising sea levels is where we’ve chosen to live. If you’re wealthy, you’ll probably cope. If you’re not, good luck.
64 open space
by Michelle Nijhuis Choose your future dream home: the mountains of Colorado or a rundown town in upstate New York.
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
summer 2013
onearth 1
A publication of the
n a t u r a l r e s o u r ce s d e f en s e c o u nc i l Editor-in-Chief Executive Editor
George Black
ARTICLES Editor
Douglas S. Barasch Managing Editor
Janet Gold
Jeff Turrentine
editor, ONEARTH.ORG Scott Dodd Associate editor, onearth.org Melissa Mahony Art Director gail Ghezzi Photo Editor Gail Henr y Editorial Assistant Copy Editors Research Interns
Jon Mark Ponder David Gunderson, Elise Marton Elizabeth Bland, Mar y Beth Griggs, Daisy Yuhas Jessica Camille Aguirre, Eli Chen, Henr y Gass
editor-at-large Ted Genoways Contributing Editors Bruce Barcott, Rick Bass, Michael Behar, Alan Burdick,
Craig Canine, Barr y Estabrook, Tim Folger, Susan Freinkel, David Gessner, Edward Hoagland, Sharon Levy, Bill McKibben, Mar y Oliver, Elizabeth Royte, Sharman Apt Russell, Alex Shoumatoff, Bruce Stutz, Laura Wright Treadway, Jocelyn C. Zuckerman
Online correspondents Ben Jervey, Kim Tingley Online Production Auden Shim creative consultant J.-C. Suarès Advertising Director Larr y Guerra
Top: Enjoy a float trip on the scenic Bow River on Caravan’s Canadian Rockies, Glacier Park Vacation; Hike Yosemite Valley, relax overnight at Yosemite View Lodge on Caravan’s California Coast, Wine Country Vacation; Visit Jenny Lake on Caravan’s Mt. Rushmore, Grand Tetons, Yellowstone Vacation
publisher Edwin Chen Deputy Publisher Francesca Koe 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
Ex Officio Frances Beinecke, Peter Lehner, Jack Murray Founder John H. Adams
Visit America’s Parks
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 Editorial Pur pose
onearth is a quarterly magazine of thought and opinion on the environment. It is open to diverse points of view; the opinions expressed by contributors and the editors are their own and not necessarily those of NRDC. NRDC does not endorse the products or services that are advertised in the pages of onearth.
A bout N RD C NRDC is a national nonprofit organization with 1.4 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. NRDC Office s 40 West 20th St. New York, NY 10011 212-727-2700
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onearth (issn 1537-4246) (volume 35, number 2) 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.
The MIT Press
Two experts explain the consequences for the planet when corporations use sustainability as a business tool.
Harvesting the Biosphere What We Have Taken from Nature Vaclav Smil An interdisciplinary and quantitative account of human claims on the biosphere’s stores of living matter, from prehistoric hunting to modern energy production.
The Rediscovery of the Wild edited by Peter H. Kahn, Jr., and Patricia H. Hasbach A compelling case for connecting with the wild, for our psychological and physical well-being and to flourish as a species.
Giving Kids a Fair Chance James J. Heckman A top economist weighs in on one of the most urgent questions of our times: What is the source of inequality and what is the remedy?
The MIT Press mitpress.mit.edu
.org
volume 35
number 2
summer 2013
Find links to everything on this page at onearth.org/web
4c onnect 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 Holy Smokescreen!
Five years ago, Myron Stafford moved to rural Nebraska, joined the local board of deacons, preached Sunday sermons in the Baptist church, and officiated at weddings and funerals. But he’s not a real minister—he’s a land agent for the company trying to build the Keystone XL tar sands oil pipeline. And TransCanada isn’t paying him to save souls. onearth.org/13sum/kxl
Are You Wearing Toxic Socks?
The Environmental Protection Agency is abusing a legal loophole that allows pesticides in your clothing, cosmetics, and baby blankets without ensuring their safety. onearth.org/13sum/epa
Top left: Abdul Kadir Audah/getty images; RIGHT: David Chapman/Alamy; far right: gail henry
The New Pork Gospel
Raising pigs dosed with antibiotics in cramped pens nearly killed Missouri pork farmer Russ Kremer. Now he preaches a better way. Chipotle, for one, is a believer—the restaurant even made a commercial inspired by Kremer’s story. onearth.org/13sum/pork
4F E A T U R E D
BLOGS
4mo st p opular
Beer Saved Civilization Once. Now It’s Our Turn.
Who Needs Hurricanes When You’ve Got the North Carolina Legislature?
A Tree House Grows in
Brooklyn
Town Board to Residents: Shut Up About That Darn Fracking Thing, Willya?
Forest Service Rethinks Controversial Firefighting Rule More online-only stories: onearth.org/webexclusives
Pigs, pints, and poison ivy? We’re all about eclecticism at OnEarth.org. And in that spirit, our digital intern JESSICA CAMILLE AGUIRRE
has explored how noxious weeds are getting worse, why clean water matters to brewmasters, and how moms are joining the fight against antibiotic abuse in livestock. Where will her reporting take her next? Check onearth.org/aguirre to find out or follow her on Twitter: @jessicacaguirre
onearth.org/blog
500-Pound Poison Ivy?
Baby Bird Bonanza
Eating Nuclear Sushi
Yes, the pesky plants are getting bigger—and your rash is going to get worse— because of climate change. Pass the calamine... onearth.org/13sum/ivy
Don’t click this if you’re pressed for time: we’ve got five adorable nestcams you won’t be able to resist. onearth.org/13sum/ birdcams
Two years after Fukushima, the response to radiationcontaminated tuna illustrates a disturbing scientific divide. onearth.org/13sum/sushi
summer 2013
onearth 5
Pax OnEarth 3rd pg ad 2013.ƒ_Pax On Investing ad 5/10/13 12:31 PM Page 1
contributors Jeff Grunewald (“Grand Slam in Seattle,” p. 38) has been using 3D computer graphics to create illustrations for advertising, editorial, and educational clients for 18 years. Prior to his career as an illustrator, he was a commercial photographer with a particular focus on product photography and special effects.
Are you a resourceful investor?
michelle nijhuis (“The Prodigal Daughter,” p. 64) writes about science and the environment for National Geographic, Smithsonian, and other publications. Her work will appear in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013. A longtime contributing editor at High Country News, she lives off the grid with her family in western Colorado.
Then resource optimization may belong in your portfolio. The Pax World Global Environmental Markets Fund (PGRNX) invests in innovative companies around the world that are developing resource optimization solutions in the areas of energy efficiency, water infrastructure and waste management.
will Oremus (“Taking It to the Tweets,” p. 26) is a staff writer at Slate and lead blogger for Future Tense, where he covers technology, science, policy, and digital culture. Raised in Columbus, Ohio, he graduated from Stanford University and the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and lives in New York City. 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.
Nijhuis: J.T. Thomas
Equity investments are subject to market fluctuations. The Fund’s share price can fall because of weakness in the broad market, a particular industry, or specific holdings. Emerging market and international investments involve risk of capital loss from unfavorable fluctuations in currency values, differences in generally accepted accounting principles, economic or political instability in other nations or increased volatility and lower trading volume. Before investing in a Pax World fund, you should carefully consider the fund’s investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses. For this and other important information about the fund, please obtain a fund prospectus by calling 800.767.1729 or visiting www.paxworld.com. Please read it carefully before investing. Distributed by: ALPS Distributors, Inc. Member FINRA (06/13)
Thomas Alleman (“L.A. Takes the High Road,” p. 28) is a photographer whose work has been published in Time, People, Businessweek, National Geographic Traveler, and many other magazines. He is completing “Sunshine & Noir,” a collection of black-and-white urban landscapes made in the neighborhoods of Los Angeles.
Passing on our garden heritage taste our passion Preserving our garden heritage since 1975
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editor’s letter HAVE YOU VISITED LOS ANGELES LATELY?
O
n the back lots of Hollywood movie studios, our articles editor
JEFF TURRENTINE reminds us, “brilliant production designers once transformed Southern
D ouglas S . b aras c h
8 onearth
spring 2013
Poon Watchara-Amphaiwan
California into the antebellum South, first-century Jerusalem, and the Land of Oz.” So what better setting for a tale of urban renewal, reinvention, and reimagination than Los Angeles—where now, he says, equally dedicated teams of individuals are attempting to make it into “a very different place—not a place out of the past or a children’s fantasy book … [but] a better, more sustainable version of itself…. With the whole city as their back lot, they’re designing the L.A. of the future.” The dilemmas L.A. confronts are not unlike those of most major cities around the world: how to rein in the excesses of modern industrialized society before we run out of the basics, especially clean water and breathable air. In the last few decades of the twentieth cenWhen he first proposed his story, the tury, observes Turrentine, Los Angeles author described his narrative in terms “seemed stuck in an existential traffic of a city in need of atonement for past jam of its own devising. And in true Holsins: profligate water use, overreliance lywood blockbuster fashion, climate change had introduced a ticking-clock on cars, and unchecked sprawl element to the whole affair.” As someone who, like Turrentine, once lived in L.A., I have (until now) regarded the city as perhaps the most unlikely of all U.S. metropolises to transform itself on any meaningful scale. When he first proposed his story, Turrentine described his narrative in terms of a city in need of atonement for a triptych of past sins: profligate water use, overreliance on single-passenger automobiles, and unchecked sprawl. And yet Turrentine now sees in his former city a sincere, sweeping move toward redemption. In the next two decades Los Angeles will undertake major efforts to conserve and recycle water, embrace and expand mass transit, and build denser, more sustainable urban communities that reduce the distances between the places people live, work, shop, and play. Moreover, the city will accomplish all this through the implementation of thoughtfully crafted laws—which, in a city as diverse and politically charged as L.A., is no small feat. But no piece of legislation, however well crafted, can yield results if there’s not a cultural shift to go along with it. As Turrentine describes it, “To do something as grand as remaking a city requires political leadership, to be sure, but it also requires something else: a comprehensive, time-release public policy that allows a plan to grow and adapt over years, or even generations, until its goals take on the organic quality of shared civic ideals.” What we’ll be seeing in Southern California during the next 20 years will “represent not only a sea change in the way the region will look and function over the century to come, but an equally dramatic shift in how its residents are coming to perceive themselves.” It’s entirely possible that the rest of the nation, too, could find itself looking to Los Angeles as an example. With apologies to New York, the message of this particular L.A. story may well be: if sustainability can make it there, it can make it anywhere.
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view from NRDC put climate change high on the President’s to-do list
my eye. A lot of it concerned the impact felt by ordinary people. For example, Jimmy Strickland, who runs a small accounting business a few blocks from the waterfront in Norfolk, Virginia, has lived through three powerful storms in the past 10 years. After each one, Strickland had to close his business for two months to make repairs. “You lose time, and time is money,” Strickland told the paper. Strickland is just one of millions of Americans already feeling the destructive force of climate change. From New Yorkers who lived in the 305,000 homes damaged by Superstorm Sandy to residents of the more than 2,500 counties declared drought disaster areas last year, people around the nation are getting hit by extreme weather. Their stories confirm that climate change doesn’t just threaten polar bears and ice fields in the Arctic; it endangers families here at home. President Obama has repeatedly declared his commitment to tackling the climate crisis. But six months into his second term, it’s clear that climate change will remain at the top of his agenda only if Americans demand that he take significant steps to cut carbon pollution. People around the nation are getting Fortunately, many people are raising their voices—from the tens of hit by extreme weather. Climate change thousands who have rallied across the doesn’t just threaten Arctic polar bears; country against the Keystone XL tar it endangers families here at home. sands pipeline to the Kansas residents who worked with NRDC to beat back an attempt to repeal the state’s clean energy standard, a measure that helped generate thousands of local jobs in the wind industry. I encourage you to add your voice to this growing chorus and call on the president to take two critical steps. First, urge him to use the Environmental Protection Agency’s authority to limit carbon pollution from existing power plants—our nation’s largest source of global-warming pollution. NRDC has proposed a cost-effective plan that would allow the EPA to set standards to reduce carbon pollution by 26 percent by 2020. Second, ask President Obama to block the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. The carbon pollution from producing and consuming the tar sands oil transported by Keystone XL would be equivalent to the emissions from more than 37 million cars. If the president rejects the pipeline, tar sands oil will remain where it belongs: in the ground. To take these steps, the president must know that we are behind him. Phone the White House, write letters to the editor, talk to your local leaders. These are not mere gestures: President Obama nearly doubled fuel economy standards last summer in part because he knew drivers, autoworkers, and environmentalists wanted them. He finalized the first-ever mercury limits on power plants after the EPA received 800,000 comments in support of the standards. We can create the same kind of momentum for cleaning up power plants and rejecting the Keystone XL pipeline. We just need your help.
francEs beinecke, President
1 0 onearth
s u mm e r 2 0 1 3
Matt Greenslade/photo-nyc.com
L
ast February, a special report on climate change in USA Today caught
Create Your Own Lasting Legacy
Photo: Š Tim Fitzharris/Minden Pictures
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
Let’s not weaken a good law the canyons of Utah to the Chesapeake Bay, from the 1943 painting Freedom of Speech, an Texas Hill Country to the Everglades. The Magna Carta American everyman in faded kha- of environmental law, NEPA requires a thorough review kis stands tall in a public meeting, of the potential impacts and risks of major projects, from speaking his mind and exercising a building a dam to granting a permit for factory wastewater basic democratic right. At the time, discharge. Federal agencies must consider reasonable though, citizens had no guarantee improvements and alternatives to a proposal, and must their voices would be heard if they hold public hearings and receive public comments before stood up to speak out for clean water, giving their approval. The law also enables citizens to have a say in keeping our environmental protections up to date. fresh air, or unspoiled wilderness. What changed? Something called the National Environ- In April, for example, a federal judge in San Jose, California, mental Policy Act, or NEPA, which passed with overwhelm- ruled that the Bureau of Land Management had violated ing bipartisan support in both houses of Congress and was NEPA provisions by not taking a “hard look” at the potensigned into law by President Richard Nixon on the first day tial environmental impact before leasing federal land for of 1970. The legislation guarantees citizens the opportunity to fracking. The lawsuit itself, brought by environmentalists, comment on proposed projects or actions the federal govern- would not have been possible without NEPA. The lawmakers ment approves, funds, who voted for NEPA or carries out. NEPA It is the Magna Carta of four decades ago not only protects our environmental law, requiring a review understood that the environment but also of the risks of major projects and public will is the consafeguards the princiscience of our democple and practice of parenabling citizens to have a say in racy, and that trust in ticipatory democracy. keeping our protections up to date our government rests Now, some in Conupon the consent of gress want to water down or put limits on NEPA. Under the guise of streamlin- the governed. NEPA takes the people’s business out of the ing government, foes in the Senate have tried to fast-track shadowy control of special interests and into the light of NEPA review in certain cases, a move that would weaken public scrutiny. We all have a stake in what happens to our this essential law. In the House, the Natural Resources Com- water, air, land, and wildlife. NEPA safeguards that right, mittee recently renamed its Subcommittee on the National even as it protects our environment and health. And we must Parks, Forests and Public Lands. It’s now the Subcommittee stand up for NEPA, just as it stands up for us. on Public Lands and Environmental Regulation. Full committee chairman Doc Hastings, a Republican from Washington Author’s Note: In my last column, I reported on the percentage of U.S. corn that was lost last year due to drought. To State, has hunkered down for a sustained attack. “After 40 years, mounds of red tape and exposure to clarify, while half the nation’s corn crop suffered during endless litigation and regulatory delay have corroded the much of the growing season, actual harvests for 2012 were original intent of the law,” Hastings said in a February down 25 percent when compared with the per-acre yield in press statement. He called for a Government Accountability 2009, the last year in which crop output wasn’t diminished by Office audit of NEPA compliance costs, asserting that the drought, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. law had fostered “a costly and complex regulatory process that does more to impede job creation and economic Bob Deans, NRDC’s director of federal communications, is a growth than protect the environment.” veteran newspaper reporter and a former president of the White That’s absurd. For more than four decades, NEPA has House Correspondents’ Association. His most recent book is Reckless: stood sentry over the national inheritance we share, from The Political Assault on the American Environment.
1 2 onearth
summer 2013
illustration by bruce morser
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MIST OPPORTUNITY As it thaws, Canada’s Banff National Park is utterly transformed.
A
To be in Banff as the snow melts is to see the world wake up B y a n d r e w N i k i f oru k
fter winter’s snows have finished their seasonal work
scrubbing the sky clean, the clear late-spring air of Banff National Park enters the lungs like a riotous celebration. As soon as the last of the skiers and snowboarders have come back down to earth, cold rivers gurgle back to life. Bears awaken, poppies bloom. Banff reminds us that there’s a strict order to this world with roots in neither the digital nor the mechanical. But the shift from cold-weather activities to warm-weather pursuits also highlights ageold tensions between Banff, the crown jewel of Canada’s famed national park system, and Banff, the bustling tourist destination that draws three million visitors a year. Its dual identity means that you can come to Banff to buy a T-shirt, run a marathon, fly a hang glider, and eat fast food; or you can come here to catch a glimpse of a mama grizzly with her cubs or an above-it-all mountain goat proudly perched atop Mount Rundle. Given deep budget cuts to Banff National Park’s environmental services and interpretive programs, though, it’s getting harder and harder to have what locals call a “natural park experience.” Even so, a trip to this blue-skied swath of the Canadian Rockies in late spring or early summer is the perfect refresher course for those who may have forgotten how to become one with nature. Sap from lodgepoles and white spruce is running freely, filling the air with its reanimating fragrance. And the sound made by the last of the high-altitude winter ice as it melts and hurtles to the ground fills Bow Falls with the crashing music of rebirth.
sos
Unkindest Cuts nearly two decades ago, when
rapidly multiplying elk were disrupting the growth of new vegetation in Banff’s Bow Valley, biologists, monitoring technicians, and other Parks Canada ecosystems specialists restored the balance by giving wolves and cougars, the elk’s natural predators, a helping hand. But budget cuts—$29 million last year and $51 million more projected for the coming year—have meant the end of many services park-goers take for granted, such as visitors’ centers and trail-clearing in the wintertime. These cuts have also led to the loss of approximately 600 Parks Canada jobs, including a high percentage of scientists. The Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society (cpaws.org) has long been a voice for Canada’s magnificent, and imperiled, natural treasures; these days, the organization has its work cut out for it.
stay at the old-world Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel, now celebrating its 125th year of operation. fairmont.com/banff-springs hike to a high-altitude picnic spot along the breathtaking Spray River trail, a nine-mile loop. banffguy.weebly.com/spray-river-loop.html devour wild mushroom ravioli at the upscale and vegetarian Nourish Bistro, a rarity in meat-loving Alberta. nourishbistro.com 1 4 onearth
summer 2013
barrett & mackay
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Arrive in Philadelphia and enjoy a sightseeing tour. Then your scenic journey begins offering spectacular and colorful vistas through Amish Country to Gettysburg. Travel north with a stop at the Corning Museum of Glass into Ontario and awe-inspiring Niagara Falls! Return to upstate New York where you will board a cruise through the 1000 Islands; drive through the six-million-acre civilized wilderness of the Adirondack region, stop in Lake Placid and then into the forest area of New England: The White Mountains, including Franconia Notch State Park, New Hampshire. Witness the incredible waterfalls at Flume Gorge and enjoy a trip on the Cannon Aerial Tramway. Next drive along the New England coast to Boston, with a city tour and visit Cape Cod, exploring Chatham and Provincetown. View the gorgeous Mansions of Newport, Rhode Island en route to Bridgeport, Connecticut and tour New York City seeing all the major sights of the “Big Apple.” Price per person, based on double occupancy. Add $159 tax/service/government fees. Alternate departure dates available in September & October 2013. Seasonal rates may apply. Airfare is extra. *
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Enjoy the best New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day you have had in years with YMT. Begin in the “City of Angels” that includes a tour of Los Angeles, Hollywood and Beverly Hills. Attend a VIP presentation on the history and traditions of the Rose Parade, plus an exclusive, pre-parade, after public hours, float building and viewing at the Rosemont Pavilion with included dinner. Then on Wednesday, January 1, 2014, observe the 125th Rose Parade from your reserved YMT grand stand seats!
Includes: quality hotels, inter-island flights, baggage handling, tour director, special events and escorted sightseeing on all four islands. * Price per person, based on double occupancy. Add $149 tax/ service/government fees. Alternate departure dates available in 2013 & 2014. Seasonal rates may apply. Airfare is extra.
On Friday, January 3, depart for Central California. Visit the beach community of Santa Barbara and its Camino Real Mission; the Danish Village of Solvang; tour the world renowned Hearst Castle, with its considerable collection of art and antiques and travel the scenic Big Sur and famous Highway One, to Monterey. Your last stop is San Francisco with a city tour including a trip over the Golden Gate Bridge and back, plus a ferry trip and tour of Alcatraz Island. Price per person, based on double occupancy. Add $159 tax/service/ government fees. Airfare is extra.
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summer 2013
s c i e n c e b u s i n e s s n a t u r e t e c h n o l o g y c u l t u r e p o l i t i c s
LOOKING TO LET OFF A LITTLE STEAM
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illustration by chris spollen; STATISTICS: u.s. dept. of energy (1,2), science for the public (3)
by craig canine
Suddenly, the champions of fuel-cell vehicles—which would run on hydrogen and give off water vapor as exhaust—don’t appear to be living in the world of science fiction
mini-SUV would become the first hydrogen-powered vehicle to cross the threshold from concept car to mass production. The Korean giant Jules Verne envisioned a world in which water, split apart plans to make 1,000 of the fuel-cell vehicles (FCVs) between now and into hydrogen and oxygen, would furnish a free and inex2015, then ramp up from there. A few weeks before the news from haustible fuel for heating, lighting, and transportation. In Hyundai hit, Daimler (Mercedes-Benz), Ford, and Nissan announced more recent times, hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles have been that they would collaborate on developing fuel-cell the perennial cars of the future—always technology; the group’s goal is to produce 100,000 said to be “coming soon” but never actuRead more by Craig Canine about FCVs as soon as 2017. Rounding out the list of big ally arriving in dealer showrooms. Fuelthe future of clean car technology. carmakers, both Toyota and Honda had already cell enthusiasts keep on hoping, however, onearth.org/13sum/cars revealed plans to start mass-producing FCVs in 2015. tantalized by the prospect of a car that runs on the most For some time now, it has seemed as if the bright FCV future was abundant element in the universe and emits nothing but a wisp of steam. being forestalled by a three-way game of chicken among carmakers, Finally, those enthusiasts have some news to cheer about. In infrastructure providers, and the federal and state agencies that would February, Hyundai announced that a fuel-cell version of its Tucson n his 1874 novel The Mysterious Island,
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.org
number of hydrogen fcv refueling stations in the state of california
55
number of hydrogen fcv refueling stations in the united states
75
percentage of matter in the known universe made up of hydrogen
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FRONTLINES
good finds
the cleaner-upper
C
ommunity outreach, education, marine
power point Plug ThinkEco’s Modlet into an electrical outlet, hook your appliances to it—and presto! You’re no longer wasting the “vampire” energy that gets used even when your gadgets are off. $60 at thinkecoinc.com
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When it came to hydrogen cars, the question was always: who will make the first move?
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sor of engineering and environmental science and policy at the University of California, Davis, and the founding director of its Institute of Transportation Studies. “That’s because fuel cells are three times more efficient than internal combustion engines. So you need a lot less fuel per mile.” The United States already produces 10 million tons of hydrogen a year, 95 percent of it via steam reforming. Oil refiners and chemical companies use up most of it, although Sperling says that enough could be diverted to fuel the first generation of commercial FCVs. While this was happening, scientists would continue to make impressive strides in developing and scaling up cheaper, greener methods of isolating hydrogen. The rosy scenario breaks down, of course, if government isn’t willing to step on the gas. But here, too, there are hints that the momentum is shifting. After four years of giving hydrogen the cold shoulder, the U.S. Department of Energy announced shortly after Hyundai’s news that it would be launching an initiative, H2USA, signifying a commitment to investing in infrastructure and new extraction technologies. Just how long it will be before hydrogen-powered cars are as plentiful as Priuses is still an open question—but at least it’s starting to feel as if the question begins with a when, not an if. Craig Canine is a contributing editor to OnEarth.
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research, and cleanup come together in the Vermont-based Rozalia Project for a Clean Ocean, which enlists students and other volunteers to learn about and remove junk from the nation’s waterways. After Hurricane Irene, the organization teamed up with the state’s Department of Labor to enlist Vermonters who’d lost their homes or jobs because of the flooding. The group (which was paid through disaster relief funding) spent a fair chunk of 2012 picking up a half-million pieces of detritus left on the bottom of Lake Champlain and local rivers by the hurricane. In October they worked with Chicago schools and several Windy City organizations to tidy up Lake Michigan. Perhaps the most popular Rozalia staffer is a small underwater robot that can be controlled from the water’s surface and can perform several tasks: taking videos, snapping pictures, grabbing plastic bags, and transporting sonar equipment. The robot does double duty as a member of Rozalia’s marketing department; it can easily be “copiloted” by schoolchildren, who get to learn about the array of trash clogging our rivers, lakes, and coastlines while they —HENRY GASS have fun cleaning it up.
calling all hipster farmers The Northeast Organic Farming Association Summer Conference is the Lollapalooza of the organic-food set. This year’s event will be held in Amherst, Massachusetts, August 9–11; on the menu are seminars, gardening classes, and organic eats. nofasummerconference.org
your bug juice is not incLuded
G
rown-ups deserve a summer-
camp experience too—though we can do without all the three-legged races. This summer, the 50-year-old Esalen Institute will offer more than a dozen workshops focusing on sustainability, gardening, holistic health, and improving our connection to the natural world. All sessions will take place at Esalen’s otherworldly 27-acre retreat, nestled in the hills above Big Sur, on California’s central coast. esalen.org
opposite: ulf andersen; tomatoes: Tetra Images/Corbis
need to regulate (and, for a while at least, subsidize) any nascent industry. The question was always: who will make the first move? Now that carmakers have decidedly done so, attention is turning to the other two players in this high-stakes wait-and-see game. Hydrogen, while abundant, isn’t abundant in isolation. To be used as fuel, it must be separated from the other elements to which it commonly bonds—an expensive and labor-intensive proposition that helps explain the woeful lack of hydrogen infrastructure in the United States. Right now, the cheapest way to obtain pure hydrogen is through a process called steam reforming, which uses natural gas as a feedstock—and, alas, generates carbon dioxide as a byproduct. Even so, the greenhouse-gas emissions attributable to FCVs are “about half of what you’d get with a Toyota Prius,” says Daniel Sperling, a profes-
now lives), a bookstore specializing in Native American writers. In February, Erdrich helped organize a train trip from the Twin Cities to the Forward on Climate rally in Washington, D.C., where her group met up with more than 40,000 other people who had gathered to voice opposition to the proposed Keystone XL pipeline. We spoke in the bustling lobby of the bed-and-breakfast where
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it was moving again, today, to be here with my daughter. It’s her first time in Washington, her first time seeing the White House. I’m proud that her first time here was as part of a protest march, proud that we were able to do that together. It will be engraved in her memory and heart. Readers of your novels—like Tracks and The Plague of Doves, which in-
The people in the very front of the front lines tend to be the very poorest of the poor. And in North Dakota, they’re usually the Native people. she was staying, just hours after she and her 12-year-old daughter had joined a crowd of protesters encircling the White House.
northern light
Louise Erdrich’s stories are often set in her native North Dakota.
a novel approach What’s the best way to tell the truth about the connection between land, people, and politics? It might be fiction. Louise Erdrich draws a clear
distinction between her identities as a writer and as a citizen. As a novelist, she has earned nearly every accolade possible. Her epochal first novel, Love Medicine, won the 1984 National Book Critics Circle Award; The Plague of Ted Genoways Doves was a finalist for the 2008 Pulitzer talks to Prize; and her most recent novel, The louise erdrich Round House, won last year’s National Book Award for fiction. Most of Erdrich’s works are set on a fictional reservation in North Dakota; they weave a complex, multigenerational narrative of modern Native American existence that has drawn apt comparisons to William Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County saga. As such, her work can’t help addressing the contemporary plagues of racism and poverty—and the social and environmental decay that inevitably accompanies them. In recent years, however, Erdrich, a member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa, has allowed the citizen side of herself to come more to the fore. Together with her sister, the poet Heid Erdrich, she created the Birchbark House Foundation, which supports a press dedicated to preserving their Ojibwe language and storytelling traditions. She also co-owns Birchbark Books in Minneapolis (where she
You arrived here via Amtrak, as part of a big contingent from Minnesota. Why did you decide to come by rail?
I’ve been following [Forward on Climate organizer and OnEarth contributing editor] Bill McKibben’s writing from the very beginning. When he came to speak in Minnesota, I went with my husband and a couple of friends to hear him. We walked out of the event eager to take some kind of action. Somebody came up with the idea of a train ride, and we thought: what better way to draw attention to the fact that it’s things like rail transit that are going to help get us to sustainability? I’ve always loved being on a train. Our group took over the club car in the evening, and we had this wonderful night of singing and telling stories. When we woke up, we were going through the Alleghenies. We saw the sign for Harper’s Ferry, and we looked out onto the historic buildings and the beautiful brick roundhouse you can see from the train at that stop. That was very moving. And
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terweave stories of Native American displacement and dispossession with the environmental degradation that follows—won’t be surprised to hear that these issues are dear to you. Why are they so central to your work and your worldview?
I’m a North Dakotan. That’s where I grew up, and that’s where my parents and my family are. In the 1950s, when Congress was worried about downriver flooding along the Missouri, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers built a dam in the heart of North Dakota’s Fort Berthold Reservation, displacing the Native people and creating the makings of an environmental disaster. In the 1970s, when nuclear energy was the future, Richard Nixon was prepared to declare the western part of the state a “national sacrifice area,” fit for uranium mining but not for human habitation. I believe the Bakken oil fields in North Dakota have now become our country’s “energy sacrifice area.” I’m extremely concerned about what’s happening to the environment in the western part of the state. Fracking there has resulted in a methane burnoff so large that the flares can be seen from outer space.
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FRONTLINES Too often, when we talk about the boom-and-bust economy at the heart of extraction, we talk about the environmental consequences but ignore the human consequences. Your work would seem to inhabit the space in the middle.
exporting wind energy right now. Second, we need to begin to hold accountable those people who, without regard for anything but profit, are destroying our climate and bringing an end to the Holocene. We need to call on our alma maters, our churches, our governments, anybody who has any money in fossil fuels, to divest from those companies. We have to tell them, “Let’s get out. Let’s hold these companies accountable.” Because, obviously, holding signs up isn’t enough.
There are a lot of people who are victims of the process, people who are living on the front lines in different ways. But the people in the very front of the front lines tend to be the poorest of the poor. And in North Dakota, they’re usually the I’m curious how this makes its way Native people. They’re the women into your writing, how it informs who suffer sexual assaults by the your thinking. men who’ve been brought in to I really can’t tell you. I don’t unwork the frackderstand the ing fields, the connections Find Ted Genoways in conversafamilies whose that I’m maktion with other newsmakers at tiny rural roads ing at the time. onearth.org/tedqas have been overIt’s mysterious. taken by water tankers. I mean, there’s nothing mysteriBut the guys in the man camps, ous about doing the research and the ones who go there to get trying to figure out what to write rich—they’re suffering too. My about, but after that point I do brothers worked as roughnecks have to wait for the characters to in the oil fields in the 1970s; I start talking to me. I’m harnessed know what it’s like. These guys to whatever the book, or the subtoday are inhaling God-knows- ject, wants of me. Once I choose what kinds of toxic chemicals on a subject, it’s pretty much sure to the job. A lot of them leave be- gather its force after a while. The cause they can’t breathe anymore, Round House was political and and at that point it’s game over for suspenseful, and I enjoyed being them. They worked for a year and a political-suspense novelist for a made $100,000, maybe—but now little while, just for that last book. they’ve got a lifetime’s worth of health problems. What are you reading these days
.org
soaking it all up Researchers are shedding light on the unique potential of a tiny, carbon-capturing “sponge”
I
magine a tightly packed cluster of metal atoms
and organic molecules whose total surface area, while microscopic, was so densely and intricately folded in on itself that a single gram’s worth could be theoretically unfolded and stretched out to cover an entire football field. Metal organic frameworks (MOFs) are just such things. For some time now scientists have suspected that their low mass and staggeringly high internal surface area might make them uniquely excellent at capturing and storing carbon dioxide of the kind emitted by coal-fired power plants. All those countless cracks and crevices, says Richelle Lyndon, a Ph.D. candidate at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, act just like little “pores that ‘cage’ the gases.” Now, with a research team comprising her Monash colleagues as well as scientists from Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, Lyndon has developed a brand-new type of highly photosensitive MOF that will give up its store of gases as soon as it comes into contact with ordinary sunlight. “When you hit them with it, they release the gases like a sponge,” she says. Any carbon dioxide released in this manner could then be recycled—or it could be sequestered, preventing it from entering the atmosphere and contributing to climate change. If the technology can be further refined—and Lyndon and her colleagues believe it can—light-sensitive MOFs could soon present us with one of the most highly efficient means of carbon capture and release at our disposal. In the meantime, —ELI CHEN the full potential of MOFs is still TBD.
Well, first we need to stop subsidizing oil companies and start subsidizing wind and solar. Wind and solar are big in Minnesota; we have two plants that are making solar panels. And wind is also big in North Dakota—but they don’t have the lines to transmit the energy. North Dakota really should take some of that oil money and commit to building more transmission lines. The state could be 2 0 onearth
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Do you know The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman? That one really got to me. Just the whole question behind it: would the world even miss us if we weren’t in it? It reminds me of something a woman from the Ponca tribe once told me: “The earth can shrug us off by turning her shoulder.” Some people look at a protest like this and say, “Well, you know, tree huggers, planet savers, whatever.” No. This is self‑interest. We’re not just trying to save the planet. We’re trying to save ourselves.
illustration by david goldin; right: photograph for onearth by toby burditt
that inspires you on this topic? The protesters at this rally are clearly energized. But after we all go home, what can we do next?
112 square feet
The designer and aspiring developer pauses to reflect next to one of his creations.
a small cottage industry
For Jay Shafer, a pioneer of the “tiny house” movement, less isn’t just more. Less is better.
W
By susan freinkel
hen Jay Shafer is asked to explain his
peculiar career choice, he harks back to the sprawling house in Iowa City in which he grew up. One of his chores was vacuuming all 4,000 square feet of it—even its rarely used spaces, like the dining room. That particular room, he thought, was a ridiculous waste of square footage; vacuuming it seemed like a commensurately ridiculous waste of time and energy. So years later, when Shafer decided to build a house of his own, he eliminated the dining room from his blueprints— along with most other rooms. This self-taught home builder has since become America’s foremost advocate of living small. Shafer’s houses are not merely little. They’re tiny: most of them come in at less than 120 square feet. To get around laws that bar the erection of super-small homes on most lots, he has occasionally had to resort to exploiting loopholes—such as putting his houses on trailers, since mobile-home regulations tend to be less stringent. But the typical Shafer house is a far cry from your average mobile home. With features like pitched roofs, turned-post front porches,
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cathedral windows, and broad eaves, each is a perfectly proportioned, pint-size archetype of home. Pine-paneled interiors are cozy yet surprisingly uncramped thanks to his special genius for creating storage spaces. Shafer himself lived in less than 100 square feet for more than a decade. “I never even filled up all the storage space,” he says, though he admits that whenever he bought a new book, he culled an old one from his shelves. At 48, Shafer is thoughtful and easygoing, with a wry sense of humor. (He calls himself a “claustrophile.”) Now living near Sebastopol, California, and married with two sons, he has upsized to a comparatively palatial 500 square feet. Still, he is as committed as ever to living simply and small. “It’s liberating,” he says. “Without a large mortgage hanging over your head, or a lot of house maintenance for extra space you’re not using, life gets freed up so that you can do what you want.” Shafer has built a dozen tiny houses and sold plans for nearly 1,000. “His designs are so…cute, they’ve had a huge impact on the adoption of this idea,” says Michael Jantzen, who runs the blog TinyHouseDesign. The small-house movement that Shafer helped spawn, and that people like Jantzen are helping to grow, now has its own design-book canon,
Shafer hopes to build the nation’s first tiny-house development, a village he has dubbed the Napoleon Complex
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APPROPOS
numerous blogs, several magazines, a Small House Society (which Shafer co-founded), and a year-round schedule of workshops and seminars. There are at least a dozen companies specializing in small dwellings, including Shafer’s former business, Tumbleweed Tiny Houses, and his newest venture, Four Lights Tiny House Company. But housing laws certainly don’t make it easy for tiny-homesteaders. Most building codes have minimum—but no maximum—size restrictions. Hence, he says, the proliferation of McMansions that guzzle water and energy. For now Shafer, encouraged by the movement’s growth, has big plans for tiny housing. “I want to make this dream of living simply available to more people,” he says. To that end, he has developed a set of new designs that are easier not only to build but to modify later. He’s in talks with an RV manufacturer about mass-producing his houses. Even more ambitiously, Shafer hopes to build the nation’s first tiny-house development—a village he has dubbed the Napoleon Complex. As envisioned by Shafer, the development would be zoned as an RV park but would operate as cohousing, with about 50 houses—none bigger than 500 square feet—sharing recreational and workshop space and encircling a central green. That mix of public and private areas, he says, is ideal for tiny-house inhabitants, who don’t have the room to throw a party or stow a washing machine. To Shafer’s delight, Sonoma County officials are enthusiastic about the idea, since a development like the Napoleon Complex could provide affordable housing without further straining land and water resources. Shafer dreams of eventually living in this micro-village. His wife is less enthusiastic, since it likely would mean downsizing from the family’s current 500 feet. Shafer tries to reassure her: “I’m like, dude, you’ve got to see how much I can fit into 400!” 2 2 onearth
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What it’s called: GoodGuide Compatible with: Android, Apple What it does: Provides instant info about which household products are—or aren’t—healthful, green, or socially responsible. Scan a barcode with your phone to see ratings for 120,000 items. How much it costs:
Free SPOTLIGHT In Bad Monkey (Knopf; June 11), Carl Hiaasen, the comic conscience of the Florida Keys, introduces us to an ex-cop who finds a human arm in his freezer and then watches his world spin out of control. Expect the usual cast of the corrupt, the greedy, and the kooky—plus, in this case, the simian.
caveat realtor
A
dd mortgage lenders to the list of folks with
doubts about fracking’s safety. Some are adding riders to contracts that prohibit home buyers from leasing oil, mineral, or gas rights; others are refusing to lend money for properties whose rights have already been sold or leased. Last July, Nationwide Mutual Insurance Company was forced to admit that it doesn’t cover fracking-related damage claims after an internal memo describing fracking risks as “too great to ignore” was leaked. The latest ominous sign: a National Association of Realtors report warns that home buyers are having a harder time getting straight answers about the gas-leasing and mineralrights histories of the houses they’re checking out. —GAIL HENRY
TELLING THE HOLE STORY A Leak This Size
Water loss in gallons
annual loss in dollars
per day
At $5 per 1,000 gal.
per month
1,655
49,650
2,979
11,770
353,100
21,186
26,485
794,550
47,673
36,050
1,081,500
64,890
47,090
1,412,700
84,762
Leakage estimates based on 50psi pressure
A hole in a water pipe that’s merely one-eighth of an inch in diameter—about the size of the average nail hole—can lead to a water loss of more than 3,800 gallons a day. This chart shows how much water—and money—can be lost as a result of even the tiniest ruptures. Most water utilities sponsor leak-detection programs; check yours to see what it entails, and how to avail yourself of it.
Statistics: draper aden associates; above: All Canada Photos/Alamy
FRONTLINES
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winner: A.J. Neste camera: Canon EOS 20D about THE photo: One mile off the coast of Tavarua, the heart-shaped Fijian island that’s beloved by surfers all over the world, Neste put on his water gear, grabbed his camera, and started swimming away from his boat. His goal: to get inside the famed surfing wave known as Cloudbreak—and to capture its churning beauty from below.
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Share your best photographs of life on earth with us: images of wildlife habitat, but also human habitat and wherever the two meet (harmoniously or inharmoniously). We’re looking for scenes with a strong visual point of view, attitude, and, of course, beauty. The winning photo will be published in OnEarth magazine, and the runnerup will be featured online at onearth.org. submit your photos and see contest rules at onearth.org/photocontest
Contest winner will receive a FREE trip for two to any Caravan Tours destination: Costa Rica, Guatemala, Canadian Rockies, Grand Canyon, Nova Scotia, New England & Fall Foliage—valued up to $5,000. Second-place winner will receive a pair of Vanguard Endeavor ED binoculars (value: $425). Summer 2013
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the synthesist
by alan burdick
Buehler quit his job and his band, took out a second mortgage on his house, and bought more equipment. In short order he founded Naturespace, which creates continuous-loop audio tracks of natural settings—a mountain stream, a lake at night—that can be played on iPhones, iPods, and other devices. The app landscape is thick with nature sounds, but for now, none are as rich and immersive as Naturespace’s. Other apps rely on the old standbys: birdcalls, cricket chirps, the wind as it rustles leafy tree branches. Buehler’s approach to recording has upped the experiential ante. In his audio tracks, one can hear the flap of a crow’s wings overhead, the distant knock of a woodpecker high in a tree in a cavernous redwood forest, the Doppler buzz of a lone bee approaching, circling, and moving on. As a self-described post-production purist, Buehler says he doesn’t manipulate the audio much once it has been recorded. But he readily admits that a lot of silence gets edited out. A 25-minute track might reflect several days’ worth of recording, with much of that time spent trying to figure out what, exactly, he should be listening for. “It’s not point-and-shoot,” he says. “I can’t just drop a mic in a forest for six hours, cut it, and then say: that’s it.” Buehler abandoned the idea of fetishizing what he calls “the accuracy of documenting” early on. “ ‘Isn’t this real?’—that wasn’t the takeaway,” he says. Instead, his aim is to induce a particular state of mind, to “trick the brain into believing it’s somewhere else.” A Naturespace track sounds like the sound track to a nature film directed entirely by you. “It’s a first-person perspective,” he says. Consequently, he takes great pains to avoid the sounds of other persons, including n 2001, John Buehler had a sonic epiphany. himself. Noise pollution is a persistent challenge; a single jet can spoil For years, Buehler, a musician in Chicago, had been 10 or 15 minutes of airtime. “The world is just loud,” Buehler says. working as an audio engineer on various studio projects, composing and mixing music to be played through “Even very quiet spaces have sounds from far away.” It is, admittedly, unnatural to close one’s eyes and, through wires, speakers. When a sound-engineer friend passed away, stream in the simulacrum of a natural experience. Yet much of the benBuehler was reminded of something that his friend had left in his studio years earlier: an unusual piece of audio efit of communing with nature—the sense of relaxation, of creativity, of an expanded horizon—is generated by the mind. By sidestepping the equipment called a binaural microphone, shaped like a human head and actually containing two separate microphones—one visual, Naturespace allows for a more intensely personal experience on each side, where the “ears” jut out. He pulled it out of storage, than a video documentary can. “It’s introspective,” Buehler says. “It’s as close to virtual reality as we can get.” curious about how it might function away from the studio, outdoors. Buehler has recorded all over the United States: in Wisconsin’s Hearing, like vision, is three-dimensional: we have two ears, simultaneously capturing two channels of input that differ slightly Chequamegnon National Forest, in Florida’s St. Vincent National Wildlife Refuge, on Hawaii’s Big Island. He has enas sounds reflect off our ears and skull. A binaural countered plenty of wildlife—including more than microphone recreates this effect. Buehler took his For more on the intersection of enough bears, he says. But more bothersome are friend’s microphone out to a forest in Wisconsin science, culture, and the environthe insects. Mosquitoes are the one species—other (with a few other mics placed around, for good meament, visit onearth.org/scitech than Homo sapiens—that Buehler’s listeners consure) and hit the record button. Listening to his recording with good headphones, he was astounded to hear the woods sistently don’t want to hear when they play one of his tracks. So once the microphones are on, Buehler gladly suffers for his art: standing take shape sonically inside him. perfectly still, some distance away, he draws any mosquitoes in the At the time, iPods and other digital MP3 players were just starting to enter the marketplace; earbuds had begun sprouting from atten- area toward him and away from his sensitive recording equipment. “I’m the bait,” he says. “I don’t mind so much; I’ve got really thick tive ears everywhere. With a start, Buehler realized his mission: to hair. Ticks, on the other hand, are not fun.” create recordings of nature to be played back inside one’s head, not floating around outside it. “Suddenly,” says Buehler, “I asked myself: how has the world gone Alan Burdick, a senior editor at the New Yorker and a regular OnEarth conso long without accurate sound?” tributor, is the author of Out of Eden (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
nature’s playlist
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illustration by jesse lefkowitz
.org
taking it to the tweets
W
by will oremus
ant to fight climate change
from the comfort of your own couch?
Al Gore has an app for that. In March, a Gore-backed advocacy organization, the Climate Reality Project, introduced Reality Drop, a web-based game in which players earn points by copying and pasting links to relevant climate facts into the comments sections of online articles. The goal, according to the organization’s website, is to debunk climate-denier
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myths and “win the heated climate-change conversation wherever it’s raging.” Remember when environmental activism meant holding teach-ins and marching in the streets, rather than clicking a button and checking a virtual leaderboard? I don’t. But I bet it wasn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Born in 1982, I’m a charter member of Generation Y, the first to grow up with computers. In a new book called Fast Future, 24-year-old author and activist David Burstein makes the case that millennials (as demographers have taken to calling my cohort of twenty- and earlythirtysomethings) aren’t disengaged from the critical issues of our day, as our forebears often accuse us of being. We are, he maintains, just differently engaged. And he’s right: if you handed me a picket sign, I wouldn’t know what to do with it. But give me a deliciously snarky tweet and I’ll have it in front of 2,000 followers in seconds flat. Some baby boomers are unimpressed with the millennial style of political involvement, deriding our Facebook causes and Kiva microloans as “slacktivism.” Several years ago, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman demoted Generation Y to Generation Q—“too quiet, too online, for its own good, and for the country’s own good.” Real activism, this middle-aged commentator explained, can’t be downloaded, but “can only be uploaded, the old-fashioned way—by young voters speaking truth to power, face to face, in big numbers, on campuses or the Washington Mall.” Other critics have been less gracious. One English professor published a book dubbing us “the dumbest generation” because we use technology for “social joys” rather than “intellectual labor.” Our elders have no shortage of origin theories to explain our alleged apathy. Some believe the self-esteem movement that influenced parenting styles in the 1970s and ’80s necessarily bred a generation of narcissists; others see in Facebook’s rise a powerful engine for egocentrism. If ours is more cynical than generations past, some say, then surely 9/11 is to blame; others blame the political culture of Washington gridlock, the only political culture we’ve ever known. Strip away the theories and a lot of the criticism boils down to a version of the complaint every generation has had to endure from the one that came before it: You kids have it too easy! You don’t have to walk to school uphill—both ways!—in the snow, like we did. When applied to activism, the underlying assumption would seem to be that a battle isn’t a battle unless it’s fought in the streets, staged as a sit-in, or sanctified with a Dylan song. But asking why today’s youth aren’t passing out pamphlets or forming agitprop theater companies is like asking why they’ve forsaken vinyl records and the Encyclopedia Britannica. The times, they have a-changed. Street protests haven’t gone away, of course; February’s Forward on Climate rally drew tens of thousands to Washington in a powerful show of opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline. Old-school rallies will always have a place in any broad-based activist movement. But these days, they’re just one weapon in a greatly expanded arsenal. A friend recently told me about a demonstration in Washington he was eager to attend. As news of the protest spread (via Facebook, Twitter, and text message), it was shaping up to be huge. He arrived an hour after
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the scheduled start time—and found almost no one electing the first African-American president, so too Read more coverage of opposition to there. It turned out that a huge crowd of passionhave young people helped push America toward the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline at fueled activists had gathered, but only long enough embracing other historic firsts. The causes of maronearth.org/keystonexl to take photos of themselves looking determined riage equality, immigration reform, and marijuana and holding up a big banner. Then they posted the pics to Facebook, decriminalization are three that millennials—whether they self-identify sent an e-mail blast to the media, and went home. as conservative or liberal, Republican or Democrat—tend to support. To those who fondly remember the we’re-all-in-this-together glue Not coincidentally, in just the past year or so the momentum in each that bonded protesters as they linked arms on the Mall, the millen- of these struggles has shifted. nial preference for convenient, social-media-oriented activism must Climate change is another issue where the ideological politics that seem ineffective at best and self-indulgent at worst. But consider the cleave older generations are less likely to divide my own. For millenniupsides. No one has to get arrested, there are no traffic jams, and after- als, of course, climate change isn’t an abstraction: those of us 28 years ward everyone can get back to school or work. But there’s also the old or younger have never lived through a month where the global significant fact that when news of your attachment to a particular temperature dipped below average. While members of our parents’ and cause appears on your friend’s (or your cousin’s or your co-worker’s) grandparents’ generation are arguing over the validity of empirically Facebook feed, that news is coming from you. Which, according to the sound science, my friends and I have been watching— and feeling—the foundational principles of social media, makes it noteworthy in and of world warm around us. Our shared conviction that climate change itself. Your personal connection to the cause—your participation in a is real is reflected in and reinforced by our social-media interactions. rally, or maybe just your thumbs-up “liking” of it—is going to incline Among all those YouTube clips we’re constantly posting and sharing those within your social network to regard it in a way they might not are violent videos of melting Arctic ice and a trenchant critique of the have, had they learned about it via conventional media. history of international climate-change negotiations encapsulated in Advocacy efforts may not go viral as reliably as keyboard-playing an 83-second cartoon. (Google it; watch it; it’s great.) cats, but they still have a better chance of gathering momentum when In his book, Burstein characterizes the prevailing millennial attitude initiates are invited to join by someone they know and trust. In 2008 and toward activism as “pragmatic idealism.” We do care, in other words, again in 2012, pundits marveled at the role this personalizing dynamic about issues like climate change; polls consistently show that young played in the electoral triumphs of Barack Obama. It’s now conceded people support environmental regulations and alternative-energy that neither victory would have occurred without the mobilized sup- programs in greater numbers than their elders do. We’re just not port of millennials. And just as they helped push the country toward necessarily convinced (as one 79-year-old Oklahoma woman apparently was recently) that chaining our necks to an earthmover with a bicycle lock is the best way to protest the Keystone XL pipeline. Those SHORT TAKE YouTube videos may not lead directly to congressional action on, say, cap-and-trade. But certainly they’re helping to shape a future electorate that rates action on climate change among its top priorities. If the word pragmatic sends a shudder of revulsion down the spines The website Armchair Advocates was started by of nostalgic 1960s-style activists, it should be noted—with appreciation—that thanks to all of their hard work, fighting to save the envi26-year-old Charles Bentley with the goal of showing ronment is no longer thought of as a countercultural movement. My how our clicks, comments, tweets, and Facebook likes greenest friends don’t chain themselves to trees (or earthmovers, for can be used to connect people working to improve that matter); they compete for internships at environmental nonprofits and fellowships at the Environmental Protection Agency. Others have public health, further human rights, and preserve the taken jobs in the private sector that allow them to leverage financial environment. During last year’s Rio+20 environmental and intellectual capital as they update the old adage “doing good by summit, a series of articles guided visitors to differdoing well” along the practical lines Burstein has drawn. ent organizations that use social media in innovative Viewed in that light, activism via mouse-click isn’t lazy. It’s efficient. The less time millennials spend trying to get the message out, the ways to foster sustainable energy, smart growth, food more time we have to refine and adapt that message—to make sure security, and ocean conservation. On the most rethat it’s being optimally transmitted to our vast and ever-growing cent World Water Day, the site highlighted a Twitternetworks of friends, in tailored language and handpicked images that we know will make them nod their heads in affirmation or shake them based campaign that had raised millions of dollars to in righteous indignation. support more than 6,000 clean-water projects in 19 To quote one pragmatically idealistic baby boomer of renown: You countries. armchairadvocates.com ask me for a contribution/Well, you know—we’re all doing what we can.
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the capital of sprawl, gridlock, and ill-gotten water seeks redemption
l.a. takes the high road b y
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in the fast lane After decades of sprawl-induced gridlock, L.A. is now poised to become a mass-transit city.
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n the summer of 1998, my wife and I left Brooklyn
and gamely headed west to Los Angeles, as disaffected New Yorkers are wont to do, in search of the proverbial greener grass. We found it right away in front of the quintessentially L.A.–style rental house we had been dreaming of: a cozy 1920s Spanish Colonial Revival, complete with a yard and a bounteous garden. One day shortly after we moved in, I found myself standing in this garden with a flowing water hose in my hand. I happily made my way from the brilliant birds of paradise to the pink-petaled bougainvillea to the explosive blue hydrangeas to the dripping honeysuckle vines, giving all a proper soaking before completing the circuit at the base of the lemon tree—our own lemon tree!—right outside our door. I marveled at the qualityof-life upgrade we had been granted as I drenched this lucky tree’s gnarled roots, nourishing them with a stream of life-giving water that had traveled all the way from … from … where had it come from again, exactly? I had to admit that I didn’t really know. My reverie was interrupted by the staccato song of L.A.’s official bird, as a pair of choppers hovered overhead, idling noisily before zipping off in the direction of the nearby 10 Freeway. A few minutes later I went inside and flipped on the evening news. The helicopters, I learned, had been tracking the progress of a suspect who had led police on a zigzagging car chase from one L.A. freeway to another over the past hour. Aerial footage showed his vehicle slowly making its way through a sprawling asphalt landscape that didn’t look as if it could even be on the same planet as the lovely garden I had just finished tending. I looked out the window: there was my green grass, my well-watered garden, my lemon tree. I looked at the television: there was a never-ending freeway jammed with cars, lined with nondescript strip malls, marked by menace. Like countless others before us, we had been lured to Los Angeles by a mythic sales pitch depicting sunny skies, palm trees, ocean breezes, new creative opportunities, and the freedom to stretch one’s legs and move about. But quickly we would come to appreciate an inescapable irony: the pitch had proved too effective. So many had heard it and heeded it over the years that Los Angeles had become a standing-room-only Shangri-la. We were free to move about, all right—on traffic-clogged roads that made the “freedom” of driving feel more like indentured servitude. Our fantastical garden oasis was surrounded on all sides by drab, squat, utilitarian apartment complexes. Remarking on the lack of attractive public green space in our neighborhood, my wife noted sardonically that we had to drive somewhere if we wanted to take a walk. But if there’s one city in the world that knows anything about reinvention, it’s Los Angeles. Our house happened to sit only a few blocks from the site of the movie-studio back lot where teams of
brilliant production designers had once transformed a small patch of Southern California into the antebellum South, first-century Jerusalem, and the Land of Oz. Today there are equally creative, equally dedicated teams of individuals attempting to make Los Angeles into a very different place—but not a place out of the past or a children’s fantasy book. These people are hoping to turn it into a better, more sustainable version of itself, one that will be able to bright future meet the formidable water, air, and climate chal- Passengers step lenges the twenty-first century is sure to throw its off a Metro Gold way. With the whole city as their back lot, they’re Line train in South Pasadena. designing the L.A. of the future.
as the american eden began filling up, the powerful cluster of city managers, newspaper owners, oil tycoons, and real-estate developers who mapped l.a.’s destiny grasped the seriousness of the situation In the beginning, by nearly all accounts, the swath of land
settled by the 44 pobladores who founded the city of Los Angeles in 1781 was positively Edenic. These first settlers (largely of Spanish, African, or Native American extraction) arrived at a designated plot beside the rushing, trout- and salmon-filled Porciuncula River and began erecting their new town, on orders from the Spanish colonial governor. Try to imagine what greeted them: the wide river, with its deeply wooded floodplain; an abundance of wildlife, including antelope, deer, and grizzlies; swamps and marshes where waterfowl loved to congregate; from the west, the salty kiss of the Pacific Ocean’s
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breeze-carried scent; to the north, views of tall, majestic mountains. Though the discovery of gold in 1849 made San Francisco the oddson favorite to become California’s lodestar city, the population of Los Angeles continued to grow, from about 5,000 to more than 100,000, during the last half of the nineteenth century. By 1920 (right around the time that four brothers named Warner were cementing the deal on a lot on Sunset Boulevard, from which they hoped to produce their next batch of popular moving pictures), L.A. had overtaken its sister by the bay. San Francisco was home to half a million souls. But Los Angeles was home to 70,000 more. As the American Eden began filling up, the powerful cluster of city managers, newspaper owners, oil tycoons, and real-estate developers who jointly mapped the city’s destiny from behind closed doors looked around and fully grasped the seriousness of the situation. First and foremost, they realized that, like any garden, theirs would need a steady and dependable supply of water. Second, if Los Angeles were to continue to attract newcomers who desired the unique version of urban living it could provide, the city would need to stretch out, not build up; its appeal was directly tied to the way it didn’t resemble the crowded corridors and vertical cityscapes of a Manhattan or a Chicago. And finally, as a function of this decision to stretch out, L.A. would need to place its bet on the ascendant culture of the automobile. In the end, these men got Los Angeles its water; they found the city its thousands of acres of developable land; they gave it its car culture; they designed its elaborate stitchery of connecting freeways. But the Faustian bargains they had to strike in pursuit of these goals meant that the city also got a host of damnable problems to go along with them. Los Angeles got desperately thirsty, bitterly angry neighbors upstate. It got metastasizing sprawl, immortalized in satirical folk song lyrics as little boxes on the hillside, all made out of ticky-tacky, all looking just the same. It got the traffic jams and choking smog that kept Johnny Carson’s monologue writers awash in “beautiful downtown Burbank” jokes for 20 years. By the last few decades of the twentieth century, the city itself seemed stuck in an existential traffic jam of its own devising. And in true Hollywood blockbuster fashion, climate change had introduced a ticking-clock element to the whole affair. Like clean water and clean air, time was running out.
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Roman Polanski’s Chinatown, which many regard as the
greatest movie ever made about Los Angeles, hit theaters in 1974. Robert Towne’s Oscar-winning screenplay updated the cynical worldview of classic film noir for a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate American moment when practically every voter in the country felt like an unindicted co-conspirator. In the film, Los Angeles private eye Jake Gittes (played by Jack Nicholson) accepts a simple job tailing a man whose wife believes him to be cheating on her, only to uncover a conspiracy that leads him straight to the heart of the city’s power structure. Towne had based this conspiracy on a real, and still controversial, chapter in Golden State history: the 1913 diversion of massive amounts of freshwater from east-central California’s Owens Valley to Los Angeles and the building of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. The city as we know it would not have come into existence without this marvel of civil engineering and the water it delivered. But if every creation myth comes with its own singular act of original sin, then a great many Californians still regard this brazen resource-grab as the tainted apple that sullied the garden of L.A.
from nrdc the climate-City link
Amanda Eaken Deputy director of sustainable communities within NRDC’s energy and transportation program, based in San Francisco
Why is SB 375 considered such a landmark accomplishment for California? What changes has it already led to, and what future changes can we expect? SB 375 is the first state legislation in the United States to explicitly tie transportation and land use to the reduction of greenhouse gases. By linking the way the state’s different regions spend money on their individual transportation projects to emissions-cutting targets, it has already yielded results: increased investment in public transit, support for new biking infrastructure, and the planning and creation of more walkable communities. How will implementing SB 375’s goals directly improve the lives of people in Los Angeles specifically? It will help do things like double the number of subway and light-rail stops over the coming years, from 100 to 200. Right now there are people who simply won’t make the trip between two major population and employment centers— downtown L.A. and Santa Monica—because traffic gridlock makes it too difficult or too annoying. I met one man who lived on the east side and worked late hours on the west side, at UCLA; he told me that his bus ride home could take up to three and a half hours. He’d get back many nights to find his 5-year-old son, who’d been trying to wait up until his father got home, asleep in a living room chair. When the Purple Line subway extension is complete, in about 2035, a commute like his will take about an hour. Some people say meeting our climate goals requires sacrificing our quality of life, but I don’t believe it. Meeting these goals can and will dramatically improve our quality of life. How does the law help us meet the larger goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions? SB 375 has the potential to have a major impact on our larger national climate strategy. According to NRDC’s analysis, if the top 100 metropolitan regions in the country were to adopt the targets that California’s regions are already showing they can achieve, the resulting reduction in emissions would nearly equal those savings we expect to realize through raising the average fuel efficiency of cars and trucks to 54.5 miles per gallon. That has been credited as the most effective greenhouse-gas reduction policy this country has ever adopted. This could be achieved by including similar targets in federal transportation law—a campaign NRDC is spearheading.
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Today, the nearly four million residents of Los Angeles still get more than a third of their water from the aqueduct. Other sources include the Metropolitan Water District of Southern California, a regional cooperative of water districts that pool their efforts to provide a steady supply to L.A. and other members via the Colorado River Aqueduct, and the State Water Project, which brings water down from the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta via the California Aqueduct (see “Come Back,” p. 40). Taken together, these sources represent about 90 percent of L.A.’s total intake. The remainder comes courtesy of local groundwater and recycling efforts. William Mulholland, the city’s water commissioner during the first years of the twentieth century, is the man generally credited with the idea for the Los Angeles Aqueduct and the vision for seeing it through to its completion. Before that moment arrived, back-room deals were struck between Los Angeles and land developers in the thenunincorporated San Fernando Valley to the north, deals that would further divert the aqueduct’s water to thousands of just-purchased acres, enriching a handful of insiders and setting those acres up for future annexation by the city. Frustration over such secretive dealmaking and the rapid drying out of the Owens Valley helped launch the “California water wars,” marked by semi-regular attacks on the aqueduct throughout the 1920s, sometimes involving dynamite. On a 72-degree day this past February, a friend and I decided to make the half-day’s drive from Los Angeles to see the exact spot where the Owens River ends and the Los Angeles Aqueduct begins. As chance would have it, our trip took place almost 100 years to the day after Mulholland stood on the aqueduct’s intake platform and gave the order for three large wheels to be turned, an act that effectively redirected the flow of river water into a man-made trough that would twist and 3 2 onearth
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how does your garden grow? Quite contrarily: a city known for its swimming pools and lushly landscaped lawns must draw 90 percent of its water from faraway sources via structures like the Los Angeles Aqueduct, right.
wend for 233 miles—carried only by gravity the entire way—until it reached its cascading terminus within L.A.’s city limits. Near the town of Lone Pine, we stopped to gaze at the poignantly mislabeled Owens Lake, a 100-square-mile salt flat that resembles nothing so much as a gargantuan lunar crater. The rerouting of the river that had fed into the lake for eons caused water levels to drop so precipitously that by 1926 Owens Lake was gone. Today the dried-up lake bed holds the distinction of being the single largest source of dust pollution in the United States. Strong winds blow more than 75,000 tons of noxious alkali powder off the mostly dry lake bed each year. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power (LADWP), which has administrative control over the aqueduct, must now use fully half of the water it pumps out of the valley—30 billion gallons every year—just to tamp down dust. At the tiny Eastern California Museum (in the almost-as-tiny town of Independence) we got directions to the unmarked turnoff on Highway 395 that would lead us to the aqueduct’s intake platform. I was shocked—given what I knew about the ferocity of the water wars—to be able to drive right up to the site without having to flash an ID, explain my reasons for wanting to see it, or even pass through a gate or manned checkpoint. It was just right there, waiting for us, at the end of a short, dusty stretch of road. We stood on the platform and snapped some photos. I admired the view of the snowy Sierras for a moment before turning my gaze to regard what was technically the last marshy bend made by the rolling Owens River before it was transmuted—where I stood—into
a wholly owned piece of LADWP infrastructure. I imagined the sound of an infant’s cough during an alkali dust storm. Mentally I tried to estimate the number of Beverly Hills swimming pools that went largely unused. And I thought about that evening 15 years before, when I had watered my front lawn without any real thought as to whether my plants actually needed a drink—even though I must have known, on some dim level, that every last drop coming out of my hose had been sucked from someplace far away through a system of very long, very expensive straws.
the los angeles department of water and power must now use fully half of the water it pumps out of the valley—30 billion gallons every year—to tamp down dust from the dried-up bed of owens lake
We drove back to the city, gliding through a mostly empty
countryside until we hit the exurbs of Palmdale and Lancaster, where the sudden preponderance of housing developments and big box stores and fast food franchises combined to form a gaudy mirage that made me think we were already home, when in fact we were still a good 60 miles out. We had penetrated the sprawl line. Practically anyone who has ever flown into Los Angeles International Airport has experienced the shock of peering down from a window seat and suddenly realizing what sprawl, real sprawl, looks like. From a few thousand feet up, it looks far less like anything having to do with the physical organization of human civilization and more like a semiintelligent form of invasive vegetation: a sinister, stucco kudzu. But the aerial view misleads—sort of. Most people associate the idea of sprawl with low density: single-family homes and strip malls spreading out beyond the horizon. Yet when the results of the 2000 United States census were released, many were surprised to learn that Los Angeles was actually the most densely populated metropolitan area in America. In fact, as Eric Eidlin, a community planner from the San Francisco Bay Area, has observed, the so-called Southland
(representing the greater Los Angeles metropolitan area) “has been the densest urbanized area in the United States since the 1980s.” In terms of people per acre and jobs per acre—the standard measures of density—L.A. blows the metropolitan areas of New York, Chicago, and San Francisco clear out of the water. How can this be? The answer, Eidlin explains, is that the Southland has “both a relatively high density and a relatively even distribution of density throughout its urbanized area,” making it uniquely cursed. This particular combination means that it “suffers from many of the problems that accompany high population density, including extreme traffic congestion and poor air quality, but lacks many of the benefits that typically accompany more traditional versions of dense urban areas, including fast and effective public transit and a core with vibrant street life.” What the urban theorist William Fulton has termed “dense sprawl” diffuses human activity in the Southland, pushing it away from what would in most urban areas be the core of a downtown and into any number of equally dense communities. Thus does the region find itself summer 2013
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in a singular situation as it struggles to improve air quality, reduce emissions, and stretch resources over a swath of land that’s roughly the size of Indiana, with a population roughly the size of Florida’s. Los Angeles’s vision of itself before World War II was naively utopian: We can keep taking, keep growing, keep driving, and any problems we might encounter along the way will be easily handled by future generations of experts and scientists! The psychographic snapshot at midcentury—when smog levels shut the city down for an entire month in 1954, and when wildfires swept down from the hills into the tony neighborhoods of Bel Air and Brentwood, incinerating the homes of movie stars—was decidedly more nervous. The contemporary vision is science based and clearheaded. But it is also creative and hopeful. Three bold plans for decreasing L.A.’s need for distantly sourced water, reducing its reliance on the singlepassenger automobile, and reshaping its communities to mitigate the ill effects of sprawl represent not only a change in the way the region will look and function over the century to come but an equally dramatic shift in how its millions of residents are coming to perceive themselves.
one example of a major opportunity just waiting to be exploited, Parfrey said that the Hyperion sewage treatment plant (on Santa Monica Bay, just below LAX) currently dumps an average of 350 million gallons of primary treated wastewater into the Pacific every day. Pipes leading to a nearby facility where that water could be further treated before re-entering the city’s water system simply can’t handle the capacity. “This is water that might have come all the way from the Wyoming Rockies, down the Green River to the Colorado,” Parfrey said. “Or it may have come down from Mount Shasta, through the Bay-Delta and over the Tehachapi Mountains via the world’s highest water conveyance.” Yet after putting so much effort and energy into getting it to Los Angeles, “we use it once, and out it goes.” The current plan calls for massively increasing the outflow capacity of facilities such as Hyperion through the fourfold expansion of LADWP’s system of “purple pipes,” which carry treated wastewater to sites where it can be used in a variety of nonpotable settings, such
FOR 20 years, jonathan
Parfrey has been planning for this impending shift, first as the local director of Physicians for Social Responsibility and later as the executive director of the Green LA Coalition. Recently Parfrey founded Climate Resolve, an advocacy and outreach organization dedicated to putting L.A. at the top of the list of cities fighting climate change by adopting sustainability as its way of doing business. In 2009, he was appointed to the Los Angeles Board of Water and Power Commissioners, and it was the city’s water-sourcing future that I wanted to discuss when I met him for breakfast in February. Over scrambled eggs at Philippe’s—at 105 years old, this downtown dining spot almost certainly served William Mulholland a French dip sandwich or two—Parfrey explained how LADWP is paying an unusual form of tribute to Mulholland and his contemporaries by casting L.A. as “the city of the future,” just as the city fathers once did. Thanks to major improvements in conservation, water recycling, and the capture and reuse of stormwater, Parfrey told me, 25 years from now Los Angeles will be getting 37 percent of its water supply from—of all places—Los Angeles. The impact of conservation has already been made clear: in 2009 the city began requiring that residents limit their sprinkler use to certain days of the week and implementing a new system of tiered pricing; overall, water consumption fell by 20 percent. But the gains that will be achieved through recycling and capture, Parfrey said, will prove to be every bit as crucial. LADWP’s most recent Urban Water Management Plan, released in 2010, codifies the steps that will need to be taken to get to the 37 percent goal and attaches estimated gains—and dollar values. Citing 3 4 onearth
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getting real about rail Over the past 20 years, Los Angeles has laid down 88 miles of tracks that now carry more than 350,000 riders per weekday on a combination of subway and light-rail lines. Ridership has increased annually.
as parks, golf courses, nurseries, cemeteries, and carwashes. Another avenue LADWP is exploring would resuscitate the San Fernando Basin, a highly contaminated aquifer in the San Fernando Valley, by injecting it with captured stormwater and then treating the blended result as it is pumped out, in a process known as wellhead treatment. Parfrey has operated in Los Angeles environmental circles long enough to know how hard it can be—even in this Prius-driving, yogapracticing, organic-kale-munching town—to get citizens excited about paying new taxes and higher utility rates, or about workmen digging up their streets and sidewalks to install those purple pipes. But, he asks, if the city doesn’t make those investments, what happens if a major earthquake destroys the aqueduct? Or if the Colorado River dries up because of climate change? Or if there’s lighter and lighter snowpack in the Sierras? “For L.A. to be viable,” Parfrey said, “we need more options in terms of water supply. What better option could there be than the one that is literally beneath our feet?”
The man who appointed jonathan Parfrey to his water
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commissioner’s post—the Honorable Antonio R. Villaraigosa, the 41st mayor of Los Angeles—was running late. Those of us who had crammed into an overflowing classroom at UCLA to hear him speak about the future of sustainable cities were starting to wonder what was up. The reason for the mayor’s delay, it turned out, was predictable: traffic. After arriving, Villaraigosa grimly joked that the sirens and rotating blue emergency lights he and his fellow big-city mayors are entitled to use whenever they’re in a hurry are all but worthless in his hometown. If the folks in front of you can’t move, they can’t move. When it comes to getting from City Hall to UCLA, however, future mayors (the next of whom will be sworn in this July, after a runoff election to be held in May) will have a better and faster option. And they’ll have Villaraigosa, in large part, to thank for it. Once the $6 billion, nine-mile west side extension of Metro Rail’s purple subway line is completed (best guess: 2035), the next-to-last stop will be just a
short walk from the UCLA campus. The pairing of this extension with an extension of the Expo light-rail line to its south—a line that will end just a few blocks away from the the Pacific Ocean in Santa Monica— represents both an engineering triumph and a political miracle. The network of subway and light-rail lines collectively known as Los Angeles County Metro Rail began to take shape in the mid-1970s as that decade’s national gasoline shortage, combined with local frustration over worsening air quality, convinced the people of Los Angeles that the time had come for modern, rail-based rapid transit. Since 1990 Metro Rail has grown to be an impressively wide-reaching, if still underutilized, component of a larger mass-transit network that successive mayors have all helped expand to varying degrees—but none of them with the energy of Villaraigosa. The city’s first Latino mayor since the 1800s has been widely praised for his skill in marshaling different constituencies toward his masstransit goals. “There’s a developmental arc to his leadership,” said Denny Zane, the former mayor of Santa Monica, describing to me his admiration for the way Villaraigosa brought his base of Latino voters—for whom mass transit was as much about getting across town to work as it was about cutting greenhouse-gas emissions—together
with influential environmentalists he had won over during a protracted courtship that began before he even took office. Basically, Villaraigosa made both groups (and others, too) see how transit could serve as a political bridge. “By merging the Latino community’s aspirations for justice and opportunity with the environmental community’s aspirations for clean air and clean water,” Zane said, “he became the natural leader for the transit revolution.” In fomenting this revolution, Villaraigosa had help from Zane, who, as executive director of the transit advocacy group Move LA, was a principal architect of Measure R, the 2008 ballot measure that proposed funding $40 billion worth of transit projects with the aid of a countywide half-cent sales tax increase. When Villaraigosa announced on the heels of Measure R’s passage that he had won federal approval for a special financing plan that would allow him to fast-track 30 years of projects into a 10-year window, Angelenos realized just how serious he was about making transit the cornerstone of his legacy.
At UCLA, Villaraigosa acround, round, get around knowledged the political resis- Extensions to two Metro Rail lines will tance he had encountered— reduce crosstown commute times— from both the right and the which can take up to two hours in rush hour—by more than half. left—as he implemented one transit initiative after another: from congestion pricing on area freeways (in the form of high-occupancy toll lanes), to his plan to add 1,680 miles of bikeways to the city over the next three decades, to his push for bus rapid transit on Wilshire Boulevard, a major eastwest thoroughfare that runs 16 miles from downtown Los Angeles to the Pacific Ocean. “The only way you’re going to get people out of their single-passenger automobiles,” Villaraigosa told us all shortly before rushing off to his next appointment, “is to remake the city.” To do something as grand as remaking a city requires
political leadership, to be sure, but it also requires something else: a comprehensive, time-release public policy that allows a plan to grow and adapt over years, or even generations, until its goals take on the organic quality of shared civic ideals. Such was the thinking behind the Sustainable Communities and Climate Protection Act of 2008, better s UMMER 2 0 1 3
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known as SB 375. The purpose of the law is to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions in the state, but it also has the potential, if implemented thoughtfully, to do much more. SB 375 was actually conceived as a means of helping Californians carry out the goals of another law. AB 32, which passed in 2006, required the state to reduce its greenhouse-gas emissions by nearly a quarter, returning them to 1990 levels by the year 2020. The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) had worked closely with legislators on designing the bill—and with one state assemblywoman in particular, Fran Pavley, to help push it through the legislature. But as Amanda Eaken, a senior policy analyst with NRDC specializing in land use and transportation, has put it, as groundbreaking as AB 32 was, it still “didn’t tell people how to do it.” Studies had shown that passenger vehicles accounted for about 30 percent of greenhouse gases emitted statewide; California laws that regulated tailpipe exhaust and established higher fuel standards acknowledged this fact. But what they hadn’t acknowledged was the relationship between emissions from passenger vehicles and sprawl. As Eaken told me, while past laws might have done wonders for making this particular car or that particular truck more efficient, they hadn’t addressed the fact that “as our urban areas continue to expand, the amount of driving that’s required continues to go up.” NRDC, partnering with the California League of Conservation Voters and others, saw the opportunity for a new law that would finally bring crucial issues of land use and transportation policy into the discussion. NRDC became an energetic backer of SB 375, which was sponsored by State Senator Darrell Steinberg and eventually signed into law by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2008. But given the differences among California’s population centers in 3 6 onearth
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cycles of rebirth Once considered bike-unfriendly, L.A. is preparing to add 1,680 miles of new bike lanes. Bicycles are permitted on all Metro Rail trains.
terms of size, geography, climate, demographics, and other factors, the only way for lawmakers to make SB 375 politically tenable had been to grant the state’s different regions—the Bay Area, the San Diego area, the greater Los Angeles area, and others—maximum flexibility in reaching its targets. In the Southland, a regional consortium known as the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG)— whose 84 voting members represent 19 million people living in 191 municipalities—was vested with this authority. At first, recalled Hasan Ikhrata, SCAG’s executive director, his members, who are rarely of one mind about anything, were of one mind about SB 375. “They were unanimously opposed to it,” he told me. But over time, as Eaken and other SB 375 proponents worked to shift the conversation from what new regulations the law might impose on their communities to what new cost-savings and development opportunities it could present, SCAG members—even those from politically conservative Orange County, where they named the airport after John Wayne—came aboard, one by one. As Ikhrata recalled, “It went from, ‘Oh my God—what’s this bill going to do to me?’ to ‘This bill could really be helpful to me and my city and the people I represent, because the future is clearly going to be different.’” In April 2012, SCAG surprised everyone by announcing that its 84 constituent members had just approved, unanimously, a $524 billion plan to implement SB 375. Among other things, the plan calls for $246 billion—nearly half of its overall funding—to go specifically toward public transportation projects in Southern California, from the creation of new bus rapid-transit lanes and light-rail lines to the expan-
sion of L.A.’s subway system. An additional $6.7 billion is earmarked for projects encouraging Southern Californians to choose bicycling and walking over driving. SCAG members also agreed to increase the quantity of housing near transit by 60 percent within their respective communities, and to find new ways of bringing businesses and transit closer together. The Los Angeles Times lavished praise on SCAG’s plan, describing it as “a model of sustainability.” according to SCAG’s Sustainable Communities strategy,
by 2035, 87 percent of all Southern California jobs will be located within a half-mile of some form of public transportation. The Heirloom Bakery and Café in South Pasadena already is. The busy and beloved breakfast and lunch spot sits about 100 feet from a Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority’s Gold Line stop, where light-rail trains pick up commuters heading downtown and drop off the many people from all over L.A. who flock to South Pasadena to soak up its picturesque, small-town charm. South Pasadena is, not coincidentally, a model of “transit-oriented development” (TOD), the urban-planning term for commercial and
studies showed that passenger vehicles accounted for 30 percent of greenhouse gas emissions statewide. laws regulating tailpipe exhaust and establishing higher fuel standards acknowledged this fact.
residential development that exists in a mutually beneficial state of symbiosis with one or more modes of public transportation. I had come to the Heirloom Bakery to meet Michael Woo, a former member of the Los Angeles City Council and the current dean of the College of Environmental Design at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona. We sat outside and enjoyed our breakfast in the T-shirt weather of a typical San Gabriel Valley February, having to speak up only slightly whenever a bell rang and the railway crossing’s white bars descended to halt car traffic and let another Gold Line train through. Woo, an urban planner by training, was an early booster of SB 375 and, by virtue of his university’s location, often found himself singing its praises in various corners of the culturally conservative Inland Empire area east of Los Angeles. In the early days, he told me, he kept encountering a certain recalcitrance, especially from business leaders. “Their assumption was that the past prosperity of the Inland Empire was actually based on sprawl, on construction jobs, and on the high-wage, low-skill jobs of the logistics and shipping and transportation industries,” he told me. “For them, a smart-growth approach not only didn’t fit; they saw it as directly undoing what they had accomplished in the past.” Woo suspects that their fear of change was rooted in deeply held beliefs about how to define the word progress. “A lot of them may have been refugees from other cities who thought that by moving to L.A. they were getting away from the worst aspects of dirty, old, unsafe transit systems,” he said. “Many of them believed that low-density living,
automobile dependence, a culture based on private backyards instead of public open spaces simply reflected the L.A. version of the American Dream. They were reluctant to embrace transit or density as part of the solution. To them it all just seemed like going backward.” As someone whose City Council experience involved drawing transit routes and designing TOD hubs, Woo hopes planners won’t lose sight of the big picture. Development decisions have to be made in a way that minimizes the displacement that can come from gentrification, he said. And then there’s the nagging problem of how to get Angelenos from their houses and offices to those transit nodes that are going to make their lives easier, the air cleaner, and the planet cooler. “How likely is a person to take the subway if he or she has to get in the car and drive two miles just to get to the nearest station?” he asked me. “What if they can’t park once they do get there?” Aren’t they more likely, in other words, just to stay in their car and keep going? Still, Woo told me that he believes attitudes in and around Los Angeles have at last fundamentally changed—about the need for mass transit, the need for dense development, and the need to link the one with the other. When decades-old political opposition to a subway along Wilshire Boulevard can be overcome; when overtaxed Angelenos can be convinced to support a half-cent sales tax increase for funding transit measures; when conservative SCAG members from the Inland Empire and Orange County, for Pete’s sake, are among SB 375’s most vocal supporters, we can all stipulate that the game has, officially, changed. As Woo put it, with a smile on his face and a Gold Line train rushing behind him, “The dominoes are falling.” They still arrive in Los Angeles every day, just as they’ve
done every day for well over a century now: people hoping to make or remake something of themselves. Maybe they’re aspiring actors or musicians, counting on the city’s no-questions-asked policy to aid them as they morph into the next Marilyn Monroe or Marilyn Manson. Maybe they’re immigrants from El Salvador or Mexico or Korea or Russia or Israel or any one of the scores of “old countries” that the vast majority of Angelenos remain tied to, directly or indirectly, through bonds of language and custom and (fortunately for L.A. diners) cuisine. Maybe they’re just Americans who came from other less exciting, less sunny places: people with no celebrity aspirations or special exigencies, people who simply like the idea of moving someplace where creativity trumps pedigree, where you might see a movie star at the grocery For Jef f Turrentine’s perspectives store, and where you don’t have on the manmade environment, to shovel snow anymore. see onearth.org/humanlandscape But from now on, they’ll be coming to a different city. The capital of starting over is starting over. If Los Angeles follows through on its promise to change the way it consumes resources such as water and gasoline, if its citizens are in fact serious about nurturing their urban landscape with as much care as they’ve historically put into their front-yard landscaping, then this place famous for the way it has always welcomed dreamers of all kinds will be, indisputably, far more welcoming. And among the dreams it yields will be the dream—eminently realizable—of even better things to come.
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Jeff Turrentine, OnEarth’s articles editor, moved from Los Angeles back to New York in 2011. Proceeds from the sale of his car will pay for 6,000 subway rides. summer 2013
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grand slam in seattle
i
illustration by jeff grunewald f environmentalists want to touch the
hearts and minds of Americans, actor-director (and NRDC trustee) Robert Redford once suggested, they should tap into their passions. Nothing arouses greater passion than sports: 62 percent of Americans describe themselves as fans, supporting a $400 billion industry. While all major league sports have now joined the effort to green stadiums and arenas, baseball is the undisputed leader, with teams such as the Seattle Mariners setting the pace.
text by henry gass
In 2012, the Mariners won the title of American League Recycling Champions. And recycling is not all they do. A series of retrofits and policy changes at Seattle’s Safeco Field now save the Mariners about $400,000 a year in energy costs while keeping more than 1,000 tons of waste out of landfills annually. The Mariners’ winning record of environmental stewardship demonstrates that major league sports can get millions of fans cheering about something more than home runs.
scoreboard The Out of Town Scoreboard was installed in 2010. Equipped entirely with LED bulbs, it uses 90 percent less energy than the old incandescent technology, saving the team $50,000 a year.
bathrooms In Safeco Field’s 78 bathrooms, all hand towels and toilet tissue are made from 100 percent recycled fiber. Lowflow urinals in the men’s rooms use only one pint of water per flush instead of one gallon.
recycling With more than 75 concession stands, plus restaurants and cocktail lounges, the stadium generates 1,200 tons of waste annually. In 2006, only 12 percent of that was recycled; today the figure is 86 percent.
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retr actable roof Rain delays and rainouts—always a risk in Seattle— mean wasted energy and discarded food. A retractable roof minimizes these losses.
mass tr ansit Two light-rail stations and several bus lines are located within a 15-minute walk of Safeco Field. P.A. announcements and special promotions encourage fans to use mass transit.
solar panels Installed in 2012, an array of 168 panels on the skybridge from the parking garage provides power for Safeco Field. Fans can track the amount of power generated on monitors inside the stadium.
plug-ins Even on non-game days, owners of electric and hybrid vehicles can charge their batteries 24/7 at four charging stations next to the parking garage. Inside, there is free, secure parking for more than 200 bikes.
mascots Through their on-field antics and video features, Kid Compost, left, and Captain Plastic are part of a wider effort to educate younger fans about the importance of composting and recycling.
For NRDC’s detailed study of the greening of professional sports, see nrdc.org/game-changer/
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the gourmet Paul Johnson’s Monterey Fish Market specializes in sustainably sourced seafood. He is the author of an awardwinning cookbook, Fish
Forever, and co-author of The California Seafood Cookbook.
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b y
B A R R Y
y e o m a n
photographs by timothy archibald
come back
After years of decline, the rich human community that depends on California’s salmon runs may at last be rebounding
jon Rosenfield and I bushwhack through the scrubby willows that line the American River east of Sacramento. The air is crisp this October morning, and the timing of our visit should be just right to watch California’s Chinook salmon as they return to where their lives began and spawn the next generation. Rosenfield, a biologist, works for a conservation group called the Bay Institute, and he wants me to witness an annual ritual that future generations might not have the opportunity to see.
For the salmon, it’s the end of a hard journey that typically lasts three years. After hatching in the river’s gravelly bottom, the Larry Collins and his young often hang out in its shallow backwife, Barbara, fish for waters, developing the bulk and camousalmon and crab out of flage they need for survival. They then travel San Francisco’s Fisherdownstream toward the Sacramento– man’s Wharf aboard their San Joaquin Delta—the tidal estuvessel, the Autumn Gale. ary where they start their transition from fresh to salt water—and out through San Francisco Bay to the Pacific Ocean. There the fish spend most of their lives, feasting on krill, crab larvae, herring, sardines, and anchovies. This is in preparation for the most arduous part of their life cycle: the swim upstream to close the loop. By the time the salmon reach the spot where Rosenfield and I are standing, their energy has been channeled entirely from survival toward reproduction. They’ve stopped eating. Their skin is falling off. After depositing eggs or fertilizing them, they will die. Their carcasses—“these millions of 20-, 30-, 40-pound bags of fertilizer,” says Rosenfield—will be eaten by coyotes, bears, and eagles, which in turn will spread their droppings across forest floors and agricultural fields. “In watersheds where wine grapes are grown and salmon still spawn,” he says, “you can detect the ocean-nutrient signature in the wine.” We reach the bank and step onto some rocks. For a moment, I see nothing but the river’s flow. Then a fin pops out, followed by a splash. “You see that red?” Rosenfield asks, pointing to a flash of color. “That’s a sexual signal.” I notice one fish circling another in what the biologist identifies as courtship activity. My eyes adjust, and I realize the water is pocked with these displays of fertility. We wouldn’t have seen this a few years ago, Rosenfield tells me. the fisherm an
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“We might have seen a salmon or two.” Historically, up to two million Chinook returned to the Sacramento and San Joaquin river systems each year to spawn, and in 2002 the Pacific Fishery Management Council recorded 770,000 in its fall count. That number plummeted to 91,000 in 2007, such a dramatic crash that the council shut down the next two commercial-fishing seasons and much of the third. After 2009, when the spawning run bottomed out at 41,000, the population started climbing, reaching an estimated 284,000 last fall, a modestly encouraging number if not the record-breaking bounty many had hoped for. The reasons for the collapse are numerous and interconnected: the damming of California’s rivers; poor ocean conditions; the reliance on hatcheries, with their genetically inferior fish, to make up for lost habitat; and the increasing extraction of water from the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta by two giant pumping stations built to slake the Golden State’s thirst. Salmon’s decline harmed more than the birds, bears, and trees that rely on them. It also wreaked havoc on a vast human ecosystem of commercial and recreational fishers, along with businesses like marinas, restaurants, and tackle manufacturers. It roused to action small farmers inside the delta, who share the salmon’s need for water. Californians from those sectors, along with environmentalists, have banded together to warn that misguided policy decisions could permanently close an iconic fishery, devastate an economy, and destroy a traditional way of life.
B
efore sunrise on San Francisco’s Embarcadero—
before the buskers haul out their portable amplifiers, before the tourists start carrying around bread bowls sloshing with clam chowder—the local salmon business is already cranking up along the muddy back wharves. Industrial ice machines whir. Forklifts emit their back-up warning beeps. Sea lions hover near
illustration by bruce morser
fishing boats while gulls circle overhead. Down the cavernous hallway of Pier 33 and past a makeshift wall topped with coils of razor wire, the phone rings insistently inside a business called the Monterey Fish Market. Slips of paper cover a dispatcher’s table as the calls come in from white-linen restaurants, tech-firm cafés, and specialty grocers. Boxes of seafood, some trucked from less than a mile away, pass through a plastic curtain into the wholesale facility, where workers in orange and yellow rubber aprons unpack, scale, gut, carve, wash, weigh, and repack. Since 3:00 a.m. they’ve been crisscrossing one another on the concrete floor, pushing hand trolleys and loading the metal shelves with wild-caught fish. The air is cold, like the inside of a refrigerator, and filled with numbers. “Nineteen point six!” “Veinticinco nueve!” “You said you needed 25? I’ve got 18 so far.” Paul Johnson looks up from his computer to survey the hubbub. The market’s founder is 64, with swept-back salt-and-pepper hair and a voice as gravelly as a river bottom, betraying his Rhode Island roots. His arms slice the air when he talks about salmon, which he does often as one of the most outspoken voices in the effort to save the California Chinook. In the late 1970s, Johnson was tooling around the country when his motorcycle broke down in Berkeley. He camped out in a field and woke to the sounds of restaurant employees reporting for work. Right next to the field was Inn Season, a classic French and Italian restaurant opened by a local physicist. “How about a job?” someone asked. Hired as a cook, Johnson fell into the city’s “gourmet ghetto” scene, where he befriended Alice Waters, owner of the pioneering eatery Chez Panisse. The two easterners would commiserate about the sorry quality of seafood sold to Bay Area restaurants by shoddy suppliers. (Before one special dinner, a wholesaler delivered a soggy box of freezer-ruined salmon labeled in Cyrillic letters rather than the promised local Chinook.) “So I took my suicide-door Lincoln Continental and drove over to San Francisco to see what I could find,” Johnson says. Walking along Fisherman’s Wharf, breathing in the briny air, he discovered beautiful fresh salmon and other species coming off the Italian dories that dominated the local fleet. He began buying and selling seafood, then quit his cooking job to become a full-time wholesaler. He’s run the market for more than 30 years, specializing in sustainable harvests from small-boat American fishermen. The products he sells are seasonal, with none so special as California Chinook, which brings in 40 percent of his revenue during the fall-run season. “When salmon hits,” he says, “it’s like when the Giants go to the playoffs.” A few blocks north, at 4:30 a.m., Jacky Douglas is brewing coffee and readying paperwork on her charter boat, the Wacky Jacky, in preparation for the arrival of the day’s sport-fishing customers. Eighty-four years old, with blue eyes and shoulder-length silver-blond hair, she possesses every bit of the radiance that in the 1940s earned her the title of Queen of the San Francisco 49ers. During halftime, Douglas would ride around Kezar Stadium in a convertible. (“The stands whistled shrill approval,” reported the San Francisco Chronicle.) Today her preferred conveyance is the 50-foot Delta that she bought in 1976 to take people salmon fishing. By then she had spent decades paying close attention to the “kings of the fleet” as they taught her how to cut bait, read the tides, and count the minutes between buoys. A female captain was often unwelcome during those early years. Douglas was picked on in boating classes, hazed on the water, dismissed by loan officers. “They couldn’t understand why this woman wants to be a party-boat skipper,” she says. To buy the Wacky Jacky,
from nrdc the virtual river
Doug Obegi
Staff attorney with the western water project, based in NRDC’s San Francisco office
California’s water supplies and fisheries are under stress. Is climate change going to make things worse? It’s already affecting us. For instance, the winter snowpack is melting earlier than it did just a few decades ago. Climate models predict that much of the state will experience hotter temperatures and receive less snow. The upshot is that water supplies from the Bay-Delta may be reduced by 25 percent by the year 2100, and some California salmon runs could go extinct in the next 50 to 100 years. But that scary future is avoidable if we take action now to manage our dams and water resources better and to invest in the “virtual river” of efficiency, recycling, and other local sources of water. That would allow us to have both a reliable water supply and healthy rivers and fisheries, even in the face of climate change. Governor Jerry Brown has proposed a peripheral tunnel to divert water under the estuary. Is that a good idea? The scientific evidence is overwhelming: if we are to have a healthy salmon fishery and sustain other native fish, we have to take less water out of the estuary than we do today—not more. Moving the location of the big diversion pumps could cut down on the number of fish that are killed at the existing pumping stations, but if diversions are increased, that would reduce the amount of water flowing into the estuary and significantly harm salmon and other fisheries. NRDC has proposed a “portfolio alternative” for the Bay-Delta Conservation Plan that includes a smaller tunnel, operated in a scientifically sound manner, that would reduce diversions to protect salmon and other species. We’ve also recommended a package of other investments in flood protection for the delta, water conservation, and water recycling to sustain supplies to California’s cities and farms. Reducing diversions is essential if any plan for the delta is to succeed. But some people argue that reducing the amount of water diverted from the delta would threaten the state’s economy. We can have it both ways. Look at Los Angeles. Thanks to improved efficiency in the way it uses water, L.A. added one million people to its population over the past 30 years without increasing the amount of water it uses (see “L.A. Takes the High Road,” p. 28). The state’s data show that investing in things like efficiency, recycling, stormwater capture, and groundwater cleanup will generate more new water than we’ve ever diverted from the Bay-Delta. That’s why it is now state policy to reduce reliance on the delta and invest in these alternative sources of supply.
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she and her husband “hocked everything but the kids.” She worked hard to prove herself until grudging acceptance turned to affection. Today Douglas is considered both the matriarch of the San Francisco salmon community and its most sympathetic spokesperson. Her customers show up at 5:30 for a day of fishing that can stretch into the late afternoon. She still gets a thrill when someone lands his first catch, especially if it’s a child. “Everybody cheers and hollers,” she says. “We yell. We high-five it out there. Strangers become friends.” At home Douglas sleeps under a mounted 52-pound salmon. She showers in a bathroom tiled in a salmon motif. When she’s not piloting her boat, she attends every public forum she can to speak out for protection of the species. “If it wasn’t for salmon, I wouldn’t be able to go on,” she says. She’s referring to her career, but she’s also talking about how captaining the Wacky Jacky helped her blossom after a miserable childhood. “I always kept a barrier around myself,” Douglas says. “I just wonder what made me get strength enough to keep going. I think it was my family, my girls—and the salmon.”
C
alifornia’s salmon business exists, for many, at
the intersection of the commercial and the sacred. Larry Collins, a burly 55-year-old with a walrus mustache, divides his time between his own commercial fishing boat and the warehouse on Pier 45, overlooking Alcatraz, where he runs a co-op for 14 small-boat captains. During the months he and his wife, Barbara, harvest salmon, they stay out for four nights at a time. They follow the fish by day, catching them with barbless hooks, then anchor at night and turn off their 400-horsepower engine. “You shut off all the electronics, your radar and fish-finder, maybe except one radio, and you shut the main down,” Collins says. “And it’s quiet. And there you are. There’s the beach. There’s the birds. There’s the whales coming up right by the boat. You can hear the Duxbury buoy, the bell on it dinging.” If there’s a counterpoint to those quiet nights, it’s the commotion of the fleet arriving back at Fisherman’s Wharf. “It’s like a religious experience when the salmon hit the dock,” Collins says. “[Buyers] come out of the woodwork who you haven’t seen for a year and say, ‘Oh, God, these fish are beautiful.’ Every day they come over and get 500 pounds or 1,000 pounds. The tourists walking on the dock see these 20-, 30-pound salmon coming out of the fish hold of a boat, and they go, ‘We didn’t know there was salmon in California.’” But there is, even if the state’s salmon fishery isn’t as famous as Alaska’s, which in some years can be dozens of times as large. According to the Pacific Fishery Management Council, California’s commercial fishing boats unloaded an average of $17.6 million worth of Chinook annually between 1979 and 2010, adjusting for inflation. But that’s only the value of the catch; it doesn’t count the ripple effects. Collins draws an analogy to the way salmon bring the ocean’s nutrients inland. “It’s the same thing when the fleet comes in,” he says. “All that ocean goodness just flows into town. The fish come off the boats. The checks go in the captains’ pockets and the crews’ pockets. And then they go to the Safeway and they go to the fuel dock and the icehouse. They go to a restaurant and have a nice meal. They go to the chandlery to buy shackles and chains and hooks. And then those fish go to distributors that have truck drivers and fish cutters and salesmen. It just goes on and on and on.” When the fishery collapsed in 2007, so did all that activity. California officials calculated that the cancellation of the 2008 season cost the 4 4 onearth
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state’s economy $255 million and 2,263 jobs, and the 2009 closure slightly more. Other estimates ran much higher. The impact was evident, and sickening. Two large processors used to share Pier 33 with Paul Johnson’s Monterey Fish Market. After the fishery closure, both went out of business. Now in the early mornings, when the pier should be at its liveliest, it feels dark and abandoned instead. Other businesses use the space for storage. “Tables or something,” Johnson says. “I don’t know.” Larry Collins survived by focusing on crabs and digging into his savings. He also used his downtime to step up his political advocacy. But other fishermen gave up. “They were crushing boats in Fort Bragg,” he says—a port town three hours up the coast. “Drug them up on the bank and drove a Caterpillar over them and put them in Dumpsters. Boats that I fished next to for 30 years. Guys walking away from the boats because they couldn’t pay the mortgage. Guys lost their houses, they lost their wives, they lost their families. They lost—shit, I know people who killed themselves. They lost the hope to live.” The number of commercial salmon-vessel licenses issued in California dropped from 1,521 in 2003 to 1,149 last year. (Even fewer vessels are active.) Fuel docks, boat dealers, and marine supply centers were shuttered. In Sonoma County’s Bodega Bay, the owners of one bait shop lost not only their business but also their home and all their savings. They left on a Greyhound bus to live with out-of-state relatives.
T
he collapse had been building for more than a
century. Salmon are resilient creatures, capable of surviving even as humans dismantle and contaminate their habitat. But that ability has limits, and in 2007 a confluence
of factors lined up perfectly to send the population into free fall. The stresses began with the Gold Rush Jacky Douglas was elected of 1849, which silted up the waterways. to the California Outdoor That was followed by the twentiethHall of Fame in January, century frenzy of dam construction for receiving a record 40 out hydroelectric power and farm irrigation, of 41 votes. She offers which reengineered California’s river sysnot only fishing trips but tem. “Salmon are intimately tied to this whale-watching and birdriver continuum,” says Jon Rosenfield. watching expeditions. “Impound their waterways and they can’t migrate.” Some 75 percent of the salmon’s historic habitat has been lost, says the biologist Peter Moyle, associate director of the Center for Watershed Sciences at the University of California, Davis. To mitigate this loss, the state built eight salmon hatcheries, where some returning adults are diverted to produce reliable spawn. Funneled into holding ponds, the fish are killed and their eggs harvested and fertilized. Millions of hatchlings live on-site until they can be released back into the migration corridor. But these hand-raised, genetically uniform fish lack the wiles of their forebears. “They don’t know how to behave when faced with a predator,” says Moyle. When the ocean is teeming with food, that doesn’t matter so much; even with high predation rates, plenty survive. “But as soon as you get into poor conditions, then it does matter,” he explains. Ocean conditions are related to the strength of the currents that flow southward along the California coast; strong currents mean more upwelling of nutrient-rich water from the bottom to the surface. Those currents are, in turn, influenced by global atmospheric phenomena THE CAP TAI N
such as El Niño and La Niña. In 2007, Moyle says, many of the hatchery fish seemed to arrive at the ocean at the same time. “They all turned left and went over to Monterey Bay, where most food seemed to be.” Then conditions turned sour, “and these fish presumably starved to death. They disappeared,” he says. Salmon might have survived the dams, hatcheries, and ocean conditions if not for one last, overwhelming, stress: the increasing amount of freshwater that is extracted from the Sacramento–San Joaquin Delta, a 1,153-square-mile estuary formed by the confluence of its two namesake rivers (see “Delta Blues,” Fall 2008). Now mostly agricultural—its leveed islands interlaced by rivers, sloughs, and short channels called cuts—the delta supplies water to the state’s driest regions. Two pumping stations in the southern delta, one operated by the state and the other by the federal government, suck water with such force that two nearby rivers sometimes run backward. From the state pumps, 701 miles of pipelines and canals deliver drinking water to 25 million Californians, most of them farther south. (See “L.A. Takes the High Road,” p. 28) The larger federal facility exports irrigation water for one-third of the state’s farmland, most notably in the San Joaquin Valley, where the water has transformed a desert once considered uninhabitable into the nation’s top fruit- and vegetable-growing region. Pumping devastates salmon. Brett Baker, a biologist and pear farmer, lives in the northern delta, near two large gray gates that steer Sacramento River water southward toward the federal pumps. “They should have a sign that says, ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here,’” he says of the structure. “Salmon come down here and they get lost. They’re riding the surf and getting sucked from the river, and they wind up following the flow to where the pumps are.” Guided away from their ocean destination, the disoriented salmon are vulnerable to predation, high temperatures, and pollution. Some get sucked into the pumps and killed. Less water also means less flooding, which in turn diminishes the shallow, productive habitat salmon need. What’s more, to meet agricultural- and drinking-water standards, says Rosenfield, “we’ve done everything we could to make the delta into a freshwater lake rather than a dynamic tidal estuary,” using both levees and reservoir releases to hold back saltwater encroachment. This has attracted lake-dwelling invasive species: predators such as sunfish, along with plants that filter sediment out of the water and hide those predators, making it easier for them to see and target young salmon. San Joaquin Valley agricultural interests insist they need the delta’s water to feed consumers safely and reliably. “There are crops that almost entirely come from California,” says Ara Azhderian, water policy administrator at the San Luis & Delta–Mendota Water Authority. Cutting water to the valley, he insists, would “squelch one of the most productive regions in our own nation” and force us “to import more fruits and vegetables from lands where we can’t control the labor practices and pesticide usage.” Jason Peltier, deputy general manager of the Westlands Water District, adds that the valley’s farmers have already improved their irrigation practices and shifted their cropping patterns to use water more wisely. Barry Nelson, a California water consultant and former senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), acknowledges that many growers, especially in the Westlands district, have learned to grow profitably with less water. But there’s still considerable room for improvement, he says. Some farmers “irrigate the SUMMER 2 0 1 3
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way the Babylonians irrigated” and need to adopt state-of-the-art technology. Some grow low-value crops like hay (including Pear farmer Brett Baker for export to Japan) rather than high-value has a degree in biology vegetables that could finance investments in from the University of efficiency. Part of the problem, Nelson says, California, Davis. His is that water remains cheap, or even free, for family has farmed in many growers. “Their management of that the Sacramento–San resource,” he says, “will reflect the price.” Joaquin Delta since the Environmentalists like Nelson don’t call days of the Gold Rush. for the closure of the pumps. Rather, they note that water exports have kept trending upward, doubling over the past 45 years and exceeding the estuary’s capacity to support salmon. Brett Baker says he feels frustrated that his valley counterparts keep demanding more water even as fish populations collapse. “It’s like giving drink to a drunk,” he says. “It’s never enough.”
THE FARMER
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n January, after the salmon season ends, I visit Baker
on his 40-acre pear farm on the delta’s Sutter Island. Mallards fly overhead as we walk along the levee road and survey the trees below us. They are defoliated for the winter, and their red suckers stick straight up in a way that suggests oversize troll dolls. 4 6 onearth
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Soon Baker will prune the suckers and spray the trees with oil, forcing them to bloom simultaneously. In the spring he’ll start irrigating, then harvest the fruit in the summer. Some will be sold fresh. Some will end up in cans of Del Monte fruit cocktail. Baker is 29, lanky and personable, with bushy brows and long lashes. He lives with his wife and daughter in a former migrant labor camp that his parents remodeled in the 1970s and turned into their home. Across the levee is Steamboat Slough, a wide channel that was historically the shortest route between Sacramento and San Francisco. As a child, Baker used to pick blackberries on the slough’s banks— “traipsing around, thinking I was Huck Finn.” He fished there, too, catching salmon and striped bass and taking pride when his grandfather enjoyed a meal that Baker himself had reeled in. “You could bring him a Cadillac,” he says. “But that guy would really get fired up over a fresh piece of fish.” Those experiences led Baker to study fish biology at the University of California, Davis. “Oh my God, you’re going to become a tree hugger,” he recalls his father saying. The son replied, “I’ll always be a pear-tree hugger.” Baker wasn’t about to break with six generations of tradition dating back to the Gold Rush. He shows me an old Hustler Brand fruit-crate label mounted over his kitchen sink. It depicts a cowlicky boy in a jaunty cap hawking newspapers headlined “California Bartletts.” The
boy is Baker’s great-great-grandfather Charlie Fiedler, who visited San Francisco with his father after the 1906 earthquake. With the city in ruins, the market for pears collapsed, so young Fiedler grabbed some newspapers and sold them in Golden Gate Park and at Baker Beach. “That was what they used to pay the property taxes on the ranch that year,” says Baker, whose own cowlick matches his ancestor’s. “He saved the ranch. He was the hero.” Farming and fishing are “interwoven in my DNA,” Baker says. Just as starving the delta of water harms salmon populations, it also puts at risk the water quality and reliability that he as a pear grower needs to survive. “For us it’s more immediate because it stands to impact our daily life,” he says. “But for all Californians it stands to impact the future of our state—whether we’re going to have 6,000- to 10,000-acre orange groves down in the valley, or we’re going to continue to allow people to farm on a family scale up here.” We turn around, our backs to the farm, and look over the oakstudded embankment toward Steamboat Slough. “For the first time in four years or so, everybody’s excited to see there’s salmon in the river again,” Baker says. “And we have sea lions that come up into the delta to chase these fish. People are like, ‘Whoa, I haven’t seen a sea lion in three years.’ And it’s all interconnected. It’s all part of California.”
is no more water,” he told the House Subcommittee on Water and Power. “Every drop is spoken for. You can’t keep planting permanent crops. You’ve gotten way more than your share of the water and you’ve got to give some back. “Farmers and fishermen are a lot alike,” Collins added. “We’re both food providers. The weather can make us or break us. Mother Nature can be a cruel business partner. But the more water you take out of the system to smooth out your ups and downs, the more you guarantee the death spiral of my industry.”
L
ast year’s salmon season was a welcome reprieve,
thanks to more productive ocean conditions. But the operative word is reprieve: the crash and comeback are part of what Peter Moyle calls a roller-coaster cycle of “boom and bust, then bust again.” Even in a good year, only one of the Chinook’s four seasonal runs, the fall run, is commercially viable. The winter and spring runs are both listed under the federal Endangered Species Act, the former as “endangered” and the latter as “threatened.” Several forces threaten to tilt the balance further away from fish protection. An ongoing legal battle—a tangle of unresolved lawsuits and appeals—could potentially undo pumping restrictions that a federal judge put in place in 2007. (NRDC is one of the litigants.) Meanwhile, in Washington, Representative Devin Nunes, a San Joaquin Valley almon’s defenders have been in the political Republican, has been trying to get Congress to preempt California’s trenches since the 1950s, always lacking the clout and strict water-protection laws and limit enforcement of the Endangered financial resources of San Joaquin Valley agriculture. The Species Act in the delta. His legislation, which Jason Peltier calls a fishery collapse of 2007 sparked them to create the 3,000- “simple expression of frustration,” passed the House last year. Then there’s the long-term plan by California officials to build two member Golden Gate Salmon Association, which focuses on achievable population-rebuilding projects. It also inspired them to broaden underground tunnels that would divert water from the Sacramento their coalition. Commercial and recreational fishers and environ- River in the northern delta and carry it 35 miles south until it reaches mentalists joined together with delta farmers, tribal leaders (who the pumping stations. State officials and the Obama administration have traditionally depended on salmon as a dietary staple), and believe the tunnels would guarantee Californians more reliable water the industries that rely on salmon’s ripple effect. “We’ve ended up supplies while also protecting fish. But environmentalists, fishermen, with an unholy alliance,” says Baker. “These are people who have and delta farmers worry that the tunnels could starve the delta of litigated one another, and they have laid down their arms and sung water, making conditions for salmon even worse. “This silver bullet of a solution, this pipeline, it’s no solution at all,” says Baker. a verse or two of ‘Kumbaya.’” With all these political threats, some advocates fear that California The breadth of that coalition was visible during three “salmon summits” held in Northern California starting in 2010. As elected officials could lose its salmon-fishing industry altogether. That thought is listened, their constituents talked about the personal impacts of the too much for Douglas to bear. “I don’t even want to discuss that. It can’t happen, not while I’m alive,” she says. “You fishery closure. Jacky Douglas spoke, as did Baker. take the salmon and collapse it, and you take the Paul Johnson sharply criticized what he views as an Read Barry Yeoman’s previous spirit out of thousands of people. You’re collapsing unfair water grab by the San Joaquin Valley. coverage of the delta at the hearts of many. It would be devastating, just “Politically powerful industrial agriculture is takonearth.org/13sum/sanjoaquin like a big earthquake.” ing subsidized water and growing subsidized crops That potential earthquake would ravage not just an industry. It in 105-degree heat,” he told an overflow crowd in San Francisco. “Even though they have junior water rights”—a low-priority legal would mean the end of a culture: the high fives aboard the Wacky claim—“they’re persisting in planting pesticide- and water-intensive Jacky; the salmon dinners served by uniformed waiters at Scoma’s almonds, tens of thousands of acres. And then they’re complaining on Fisherman’s Wharf; the quiet nights when Larry Collins and his about it when they don’t get enough water.” Meanwhile, businesses wife lie on their boat listening to the Duxbury buoy. The old-timers like his own struggle to survive, if they haven’t yet failed. “When I on the Italian dories, or Brett Baker’s grandfather anticipating a walk down to the docks, when I open up my own phone books, when plate of his grandson’s catch, would no longer be connected to a I look at Fish Alley, where I used to sell fish for years and years, I living salmon culture, but rather would be artifacts of a history that can no longer be retrieved. see nothing but ghosts,” he said. In 2011 Larry Collins, the fisherman, drove to Fresno, in the San Joaquin Valley, to speak at a congressional hearing dominated by big Barry Yeoman is a journalist based in Durham, North Carolina. His work also agricultural interests that wanted more of the delta’s water. “There appears in The American Prospect, Parade, and the Saturday Evening Post.
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feeding the pyres Alleyways near the Ganges are piled high with wood destined for the cremation grounds.
photographs by agnès dherbeys
SAC R E D FI R E in the holy city of varanasi, can the ancient death rituals of hinduism be reconciled with the preservation of india’s dwindling forests?
story by george black summer 2013
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riverbound Before a body is laid on the pyre in Varanasi, above, it must be ritually purified by immersion in the Ganges. Like many of the porters who load wood onto boats headed for the cremation grounds, Sankatha Prasad, center, is uncertain about his age: 55 or 60, he thinks—an old man by Indian standards.
THE SPECTACLE OF WOOD In ancient times, according to Hindu legend, there
was a place called Anandavana, the Forest of Bliss, which spread out along the Ganges to the south of the sacred city of Kashi, which is known today as Benares, Banaras, or Varanasi. Its shady groves offered an idyllic setting for temples, ashrams, and places of meditation. The Forest of Bliss, like most of India’s forests, is long gone. There are many reasons for this, but one important one is hinted at in a song by the sixteenth-century poet-saint Kabir that is sometimes heard on the cremation grounds of Varanasi, as mourners wait for the fire to be lit and debate the purpose and meaning of life.
Dekh tamasha lakri ka Jite lakri Marte lakri See the spectacle of wood You need wood when you are alive You need wood when you die Cremation on a wood pyre, followed by consignment of the ashes to the Ganges, is the highest aspiration of every devout Hindu. But what if the most sacred ritual of one of the world’s great religions is also a real and growing environmental threat? Just do the math, says Anshul Garg, who grew up in a pious Hindu household, trained as a computer engineer, worked in India’s high-tech capital, Bangalore, and now runs a small New Delhi organization called Mokshda (“the one who gives salvation”). India has 1.25 billion people; 10 million die each 5 0 onearth
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year; more than 80 percent are Hindu; almost all are cremated; and burning a body takes anywhere from 400 to more than 1,000 pounds of wood. By Garg’s calculations, this equates to as much as 750 square miles of forest. Add to that the carbon emissions from eight million pyres and the uncountable tons of ash dumped into the Ganges and other sacred rivers, most of which are already open sewers. There’s an alternative, Garg says: a cremation system that is designed—unlike a conventional modern crematorium—to give mourners full and open access to the body, allowing them to conduct all the ancient funerary rituals of Hinduism, while burning only a third as much wood. He took us to see one of Mokshda’s first working units, in New Delhi. The most surprising thing about it (other than the video camera that allows those unable to attend to watch the ceremony via live online streaming) was a sign bearing the name of Mokshda’s sponsoring partner, the Oil and Natural Gas Corporation of India, accompanied by a poster with the image of a weeping tree. Mokshda has spent the past 20 years tinkering with its design and seeking the understanding and support of religious and civic authorities. Now, with the oil and gas corporation’s interest in financing 300 units in cities all across India—including Varanasi, the holiest of them all—Garg hopes that Mokshda’s time has come. A body was burning when we arrived, and the convex metal sides of the apparatus were concentrating the roaring flames into a tall, tapering chimney. All that escaped from the top was the faintest wisp of pale gray smoke. Yet Garg was not happy. Though the body had been almost completely reduced to ash, several logs, only lightly charred, were scattered around at the base of the pyre. “They didn’t have to use so much wood,” he complained. “The problem is the pandits—the priests. They also double as the wood sellers here,
A BURNING NEEd Before independence, British authorities tried repeatedly to move the cremation grounds, above, away from the city center as a public health measure but eventually gave up, concluding, “It is not that the Manikarnika and Harishchandra ghats are there for the city, but that the city is there for the ghats.”
and all they care about is their money, not the environment.” I thought often of that comment during the week that the photographer Agnès Dherbeys and I later spent on and around the cremation grounds of Varanasi. What it suggested was that Mokshda’s task will not be easy, because, for motives both pious and venal, almost everyone involved in the long chain of the cremation business, from the time the ax bites into the tree trunk to the moment the ashes are shoveled into the Ganges, has a vested interest in cutting, selling, and burning as much wood as they can.
take their “holy dip” in the Ganges are not courting disease from the river’s off-the-charts E. coli levels but immersing themselves in the purifying embrace of a goddess, Ma Ganga. On the cremation grounds, where the outsider may see a morbid obsession with death, a Banarsi sees both deep and complex ritual and the everyday secular hustle of life. The two burning ghats even come with their own resident menagerie. Cows and water buffalo lie around placidly among the pyres; rib-thin goats munch on discarded garlands of marigolds; roving packs of street dogs engage in sudden, vicious by undergoing the fights; mongooses scuttle in and out of JEWEL OF THE EAR the woodpiles; monkeys observe the sacrament of fire on this scene from nearby rooftops. Varanasi is a challenging place to most spot, hindus would achieve At the spiritual heart of Varanasi are visitors—and there are many of them, the perpetual fires of Manikarnika, the from the earnest, dreadlocked hipliberation from the endless larger of the two cremation grounds. pies who affect the manner of a Hindu But Manikarnika is not just the center saddhu to the boatloads of Japanese cycle of birth, death, of the city; to Hindus, it is the navel package tourists wearing white face and rebirth of the world, the very spot where the masks. Hindus call Varanasi “the city universe had its origins. It is said that of light” and believe that it literally floats above the earth, immune to the ravages of time, free from hunger and the great god Shiva, creator, destroyer, and conqueror of death, suffering. But to the visitor it can be intense, dark, almost hallucina- was wandering in the Forest of Bliss with his consort, Parvati, when tory in its strangeness. It is a city of crumbling buildings, filth-choked they decided to fashion another being, Vishnu, who would bring the alleyways, innumerable backstreet shrines and temples, emaciated cosmos into existence. When they saw what he had accomplished, widows holding out begging bowls, ascetics smeared with ash from Lord Shiva trembled with delight and dropped his earring. Thencethe cremation grounds—a tumult of poverty, disease, and religion forth, he decreed, the place should be known as Manikarnika, “jewel that is extreme even by Indian standards. What the visitor sees as of the ear.” And by undergoing the sacrament of fire on this spot, pollution, however, the devout Hindu sees as purity. The pilgrims Hindus would achieve moksha, liberation from the endless cycle crowding the ghats—the steep steps that line the riverbank—to of birth, death, and reincarnation. summer 2013
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heavy lifting The pace of delivery of wood to the cremation grounds accelerates in May and June, so that dealers can build up their stockpiles before the torrential monsoon rains begin. During these months, when temperatures can soar to 115 degrees, porters get a wage increase—to three dollars a day.
tination. A Varanasi timber broker, two wood sellers at Manikarnika, and a former government forestry official in New Delhi all told a Yet this is also a place of commerce and bargaining, a world of similar story. The woodcutters work for powerful local merchants middlemen and “commissions,” an infinitely elastic term in which (the word mafia is not uncommonly used). Some of the wood is only a thin line separates the taking of a legitimate percentage on smuggled into the city by riverboat under cover of night, although a business deal from outright extortion and bribery. The cycle of the official venue for the trade is the Forest Department depot, commissions begins deep in the forest. With limited exceptions, where wood is sold at auction—all of it certified, with a nudge and it is illegal to cut down a tree in India; only dead ones or those that a wink, as the result of deadfalls and blowdowns. Brokers match have been blown down in storms may up auctioneers with buyers and levy be harvested. But as with many laws in their commission. Then the trucking while distinctions of India, there is theory and there is praccontractor comes in: another commistice. Hiking one day through a rare caste are generally eroding sion. From the trucker to the porters patch of forest 40 miles or so south of to the boatmen who ferry the wood to in the new, prosperous Varanasi, I chanced upon a man and the burning ghats: more commissions. two women carrying axes. Another And payoffs to police and government india we hear so much man labored up a nearby hillside, bent officials at every stage. about, they are very much under a heavy bundle of wood. “Everywhere there is a commission “When I came here 45 years ago, man,” said one of the wood sellers. alive in Varanasi this was all forest,” said the owner of “If you are not using the commission a nearby chai stall where I stopped to man, you cannot get business. Here at take refuge from the paralyzing heat. “There were tigers, bears, and Manikarnika, the moment they see a body coming, they look for cheetahs. Now the forests are gone, and the only animals are humans.” ways to make money.” “But surely the Forest Department sends out patrols to look for “In Banarsi culture,” said the man who later arranged for us to illegal loggers?” have unrestricted access to Manikarnika, “you pay a commission “Oh yes, every day.” when you’re born, you pay a commission when you go to the temple, Seeing my puzzlement, he smiled. “You don’t understand. They and you pay a commission when you die.” go out every day to find the loggers, but to look for bribes, not to Fifty percent of the laboriously negotiated “commission” that we report them.” paid this man for access, according to someone who knows him well, This pattern continues throughout the journey of wood to its des- would go to the local police.
THE COMMISSION MEN
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city of the gods Manikarnika, center, is surrounded by temples, most dedicated to Lord Shiva, who is believed to extend his grace to anyone who dies in Varanasi. Right, despite the constant presence of death, local people traditionally pride themselves on their phakkarpan, or carefree attitude to life.
THE BUSINESS OF DEATH Once the wood trucks unload their cargo at Raj Ghat, a couple of miles downstream from Manikarnika, issues of caste begin to kick in, and while caste distinctions are generally eroding in the new, prosperous India we hear so much about, they are very much alive in Varanasi. The milkman caste, the Yadaw, has great influence in the wood business. Boatmen are Mallah, as are the porters who carry the eight tons of wood from each truck down a treacherous, garbage-strewn slope to the waiting boats. If one overlooks the porter in the Gucci T-shirt, the scene is very much what a nineteenth-century official of the Raj might have witnessed, or for that matter a sixteenth-century Mughal invader: scrawny, undernourished men shouldering 200-pound logs in 100-degree temperatures, for less than three dollars a day. At Manikarnika, which sees 100 or more cremations a day, the superficial impression is one of milling chaos. But in fact the business of the cremation grounds has its own internal logic, with everyone playing a defined role. It’s a little like watching teams of experienced waiters in a busy restaurant. Mourners half-walk, half-jog down the steep steps, carrying the body on its ladder-like bamboo bier, covered in brightly spangled shrouds, to the chant of Ram nam satya hai—“Truth is the name of Ram” (one of the 10 avatars of Vishnu). A Brahmin priest attends to their ritual needs, although, as the British scholar Jonathan Parry remarks drily in his book Death in Banaras, “the reputation of the priests for chicanery is at least as great as their reputation for scholarship.” In the alleyways around Manikarnika, all manner of small businesses thrive on the cremation trade: wood dealers, chai stalls, ritual barbers to tonsure the mourners, touts who try to extract “donations” from passing tourists, vendors of incense and sandalwood, small shops
selling the “goods of the skull-breaking”—the most disconcerting of the cremation rituals, in which the skull is broken open with a bamboo stave by the chief mourner, usually the eldest son, to allow the “vital breath” to escape the body. The fainthearted may perform this duty with a perfunctory jab. Others deliver the blow with a resounding thwack, as if beating a dusty carpet. While laborers stack the pyres, wood sellers and priests alike urge the purchase of as much wood as the buyer can afford. Surely you want to satisfy the wishes of the loved one? To demonstrate piety and display status? And what if the wood is insufficient, and a dog should gnaw on the unburned body parts? The dealers measure out the wood by the man, or maund—about 82 pounds. An even number is considered inauspicious. Five maunds is the recommended minimum; seven preferable; nine better yet; and the send-off for a wealthy man may take as much as 15 maunds—more than half a ton—accompanied by several pounds of fragrant sandalwood, the most prized wood of all.
KEEPERS OF THE FLAME Paradoxically, it is not the high-born priests who are masters of the cremation ground. That power—and the material wealth it brings—is vested in the Doms, a “scheduled caste,” known in less enlightened times as untouchables. No one else may touch the polluting corpse. On an arcaded balcony overlooking Manikarnika, the Doms maintain a sacred fire from which they light a bundle of straw that ignites the pyre. For this service, which only they may perform, they receive a fee. Where the money goes, no one really knows, for most Doms remain illiterate, and their homes are generally as humble as those of any other Banarsi. summer 2013
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a family feud As a result of his alcoholism, Sanjeet Chaudhri, above, has lost authority on the cremation grounds to his younger brother, Jagdish, far right. Jagdish, seated in his boat, is entitled to collect small coins and other valuables that his workers find among the ashes shoveled into the river.
We sat for a long time on this balcony, eyes stinging from the smoke, among the Doms, but things had not worked out that way. Authority within the caste these days, it turned out, is not only in the company of two of the most powerful of the Doms. For many years the caste was dominated by a single towering figure named diffuse but divisive. Jamuna is locked in a struggle over property Kailash Chaudhri, who lived with his pet alligator and a bevy of retain- rights with her sister-in-law, Saranga, that has languished in the ers in the Tiger House, a garishly painted palace that rises high above courts for 35 years—Bleak House, Indian-style. The reason for one of the nearby ghats, flanked by statues of a male and a female Sanjeet’s odd hair, and for the pink-and-white scarring on his chest, tiger. Kailash would often be seen, Parry recalls, strolling about with is that his family had thrown him out, disgusted by his alcoholism. his bodyguards, carrying a briefcase His response was to pour kerosene bulging with cash. But since Kailash’s over himself and light a match. Now during monsoon season, death, power has become more fraggreater influence lay with his younger 4 mented. Today there is no single “Dom brother, Jagdish, whom we encounthe ganges rises o feet or Raja.” Instead, a number of individuals tered later. He was a fat man, dressed more, forcing people take their turn presiding over the cremaall in white, who sat in a boat by the tion grounds, according to a bewilderriverbank, smiling up at the world like to build their pyres on a ingly complex calendar. The longer your some benign Buddha. Dom laborers concrete platform raised turn, or pari, the more you earn—and were standing up to their waists in the foul water, sieving through the slurry that doesn’t mean only the fee for lightabove flood level of black ash and now and then handing ing the sacred fire. The Doms are also up to him a small coin, a jeweled nose entitled to anything that is left on the cremation grounds: bamboo biers, discarded shrouds, partly burned stud, a gold earring—whatever last trinkets they could retrieve from logs. And there are additional “donations” to be extracted from the the cremation ground. These, too, are part of the Doms’ prerogatives. more gullible mourners. Like the priests, Parry says, the Doms “have an infamous reputation for rapacity.” SACRED AND PROFANE On this particular day, the pari belonged to Kailash’s widow, Jamuna. We found her dozing against a pillar. Flies crawled about on Back in Delhi, Anshul Garg had spoken of his efforts to win over the her pale-patterned sari. She regarded us without apparent interest Doms to the green cremation system. “I understand that it’s very and signaled for a young man to speak on her behalf. Her eldest son, sensitive,” he’d said. “Change will come only slowly. But every ritual Sanjeet, squatted nearby, a man in his middle years with a shock in this society has evolved over time. The way we marry, the food we of bleached-out orange hair and a strange, off-kilter look in his eye. eat.” The pollution of the river, the health risk to their children, and By right of inheritance, we learned, Sanjeet should be pre-eminent the rising price of wood would eventually trigger change, he thought. 5 4 onearth
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holy waters Detritus from Manikarnika, center, mingled with raw sewage from a nearby pumping station, forms a solid mat along the edge of the Ganges. Since the launch of its Ganga Action Plan in 1986, the Indian government has committed itself to the cleanup of the sacred river, but with little effect.
But sitting here at Manikarnika, I had to wonder about his optimism. goes out? The string of sewage pumping stations that the government Perhaps in Delhi or Kolkata or Bangalore, big cities with a burgeoning has built along the ghats, one of them less than 50 yards upstream from Manikarnika, are cursed by the same problem. When the pumps middle class, but in Varanasi… Mokshda? the Dom Raja’s widow frowned. She didn’t much care shut down, all that filth flows straight into the river. So could the circle be squared, the two conceptions of purity and for the sound of that. It would surely cost the Doms their livelihood. Use less wood? That would not be the Hindu way, and the wood pollution reconciled? Anshul Garg thought so, and at least one man in sellers would never stand for it. Besides, where would this Mokshda Varanasi had dedicated his life to the proposition: Veer Bhadra Mishra, contraption go? This seemed a reasonable question, especially during who was not only the chief priest of the Sankat Mochan temple, which monsoon season, when the Ganges rises 40 feet or more, inundating is dedicated to the monkey god Hanuman, but also a trained hydraulic the cremation grounds and forcing people to build their pyres on a engineer, as comfortable doing a TEDx talk on the pollution of the concrete platform raised above the flood level and in nearby alleyways. Ganges as taking his holy dip in it. There are two levels of truth, Mishra Coloring the old lady’s suspicions was the Doms’ long-standing believed, and they did not have to be in contradiction. It was possible resentment of the electric crematorium that the government had to see the river as both a purifying goddess and an open sewer. His Pure Ganges Campaign, Swatcha Ganga Abhiyan, installed at the smaller of the two burning ghats, Harishchandra. Her husband, Kailash, had fought was predicated on that belief, and I resolved to visit For more photographs of Varanasi the idea with every sinew, and it was only in 1989, him as soon as we got to Varanasi. by Agnès Dherbeys, visit onearth. after his death, that it finally came to fruition. But a week before we arrived, news came that org/13sum/cremation Later I went to visit the crematorium. It was an unMishra had died. As a person of great distinction, he prepossessing affair, bereft of any aura of spirituality, perched on raw was cremated on a special plinth at Harishchandra. The pyre was built concrete columns with bare brick walls, one arbitrarily painted pink, from a sacred wood-apple tree that had grown in his garden, and there and odd, fanciful battlements and balconies that looked as if they’d been was a good amount of sandalwood too. Ten thousand people came to borrowed from some Lego version of a Mughal palace. Inside, I found see the scientist-priest close the cycle of birth, death, and reincarnation, the custodian and two friends sitting cross-legged on a mat, playing chanting and reciting the name of Ram as the flames consumed him. cards. There was a calendar on the wall with a picture of Lord Shiva, So special was the ceremony that the Doms received an extra comcobwebs everywhere, a low electrical hum, two open ovens sitting cold mission. And when it was over, his ashes, like those of the countless and silent. Only a handful of people are brought here, mainly the very anonymous Hindus who had been burned that day in Varanasi, were poor, said the man at the nearby Vadav Tea Stall (“Mineral Water Toilet consigned to the sacred, purifying waters of Ma Ganga. Paper Coke Pepsi Chocolate and Sigrate”). And what about the power cuts? he asked rhetorically—not an infrequent occurrence in Varanasi. Agnès Dherbeys is a freelance photographer based in Paris. George Black is OnEarth’s Who wants to see their mother or father left half-burned when the power executive editor. They previously collaborated on “India Calling” (Spring 2012).
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Reviews
wordsimagesideas
the attacking ocean The Past, Present, and Future of Rising Sea Levels by brian fagan Bloomsbury, 320 pp., $30
at the water’s edge
D bloomberg via getty images
The peril we face from rising seas has a lot to do with where we have chosen to settle by mckenzie funk
espite the title, the ocean is not the focus of Brian Fagan’s
sweeping new book about sea level rise, and nor should it be. Its surface may roil with storms like Sandy, and its volume may expand—ever faster now with climate change—but ocean is always ocean, water always water. Compared with all else we know on this planet, all dwarfed by its mass, the ocean is the very definition of inertia. So what has changed so dramatically over the book’s 15,000-year span that we now need to fear sea level rise? Fagan, an anthropologist rather than an oceanographer, is very clear on this point: we have. “While as recently as eight thousand years ago,” he writes, “only a few tens of thousands of people lived at risk from rising waters—and they could adapt by readily upping stakes and moving—today millions of us live in imminent danger from the attacking ocean.” This is the basic thesis of the book: we were nomads once, and we were few. Now we are nomads no longer, and we are many, and we have placed some of our most important cities by the sea. If this seems obvious, it’s because it is. But “we cannot understand the dilemmas of the present,” Fagan says, “without placing them in a deeper historical context.” This still isn’t the reason his book is worthwhile. To understand reality is one thing. To truly own up to it is another. What Fagan achieves through the force of repetition and examples—if a few too many anecdotes—is the latter. It is impossible to read The
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Attacking Ocean without being forced to grapple with how vulnerable civilization worldwide has become to sea level rise. A professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Fagan has written more than two dozen books. He has the confidence to recognize that readers may not need to slog through every anecdote. The first chapter, where his thesis is laid out, is key—but “thereafter, you have choices,” he writes. If your interest in the historic interplay between humankind and sea levels is specific to one part of the globe—Asia, for example, or the Middle East—by all means explore geographically rather than chronologically. There is even an alternative table of contents so you can do just that. Choose your own adventure. Just be sure to end with the epilogue, Fagan asks. This is where his conclusions—all of them important, one of them surprising—await. As could be expected when Fagan encourages such skipping and skimming, it is not his narrative that captivates so much as the book’s scope—and the litany of intriguing facts we learn along the way. There were as few as 2,000 or 3,000 people living in northern Europe just 8,000 years ago, for example. There were no cities until 5,000 years ago. The Black Sea was once a lake, Euxine. The Persian Gulf was once dry land with a single river flowing through it. The North Sea was once also dry, or at least marshy, land—a prehistoric territory that scientists call Doggerland. (We know as much as
we do about Doggerland because oil exploration, partly to blame for today’s changing climate and accelerating sea level rise, led to a wealth of scientific data.) The Onge people of the Andaman and Nicobar Islands—among the last hunter-gatherers on earth— survived the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 because oral tradition told them to run to high ground the moment the earthquake struck. A Great Flood like that in Genesis is also described in the Satapatha Brahmana, a Hindu creation story. The mangrove forests of Bangladesh, natural defenses against cyclones and storm surges, are being felled for shrimp farming, which is replacing rice farming, which is more difficult because of rising salinity, which is one effect of rising seas. The most mind-bending fact in The Attacking Ocean is that since the end of the Ice Age 15,000 years ago, global sea levels have risen 122 meters—400 feet. Compare this with the modern nightmare scenario: if all of Greenland’s ice sheet were to melt as a result of climate change, today’s seas would rise little more than 20 feet. Or with what Fagan cites as a guesstimate of the warming planet’s sea level rise by 2100: two meters, or almost seven feet. Nothing better illustrates how it is the march of civilization rather than the march of the seas that has left us in our current predicament. Egypt’s Nile Delta is a case in point. The delta is an arc of famously fertile land covering 150 miles of Mediterranean shoreline and stretching 100 miles up the Nile. It became the breadbasket of one of the greatest early civilizations not despite sea level rise but because of it. During the Ice Age, the Mediterranean was a smaller, lower sea, and the Nile, with so much farther to go and farther to drop, a steeper, faster river. Spring floods carried nutrient-rich silt straight to the ocean depths. But around 7500 B.C., sea levels began
a rapid climb that would not slow for 2,000 years. By the time they did stabilize, the Nile was neither steep nor fast, and it ponded near modern Cairo. Silt piled up. Desert became oasis. Hunters and fishermen became farmers. One of the most important agricultural areas in the world was born, and on the backs of the farmers—and of the slaves who built the pyramids— pharaonic Egypt rose. The population of Egypt today is 80 million people, a third of whom still work in agriculture, half of whom still live in or near the delta. And now the sea level rise that helped create a nation is a mortal threat. Erosion is already eating away at the edges of the
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over and over. When Doggerland disappeared around 5500 B.C., there was still plenty of room for its refugees in what is now the United Kingdom or across the new North Sea in the present-day Netherlands. Around 4700 B.C., their Dutch descendants began farming, thereby binding themselves to specific patches of land. By 1000 B.C., their descendants’ descendants were clustering wealth and population in permanent cities—many of them beside the sea to take advantage of increasing maritime trade. Only then did society begin taking a real stand against the ocean, initially siting homes on raised mounds, known in Dutch as terpen, and eventually
seawalls. So much more is now at stake. Protecting the modern coastline of the wealthy Netherlands is a five-mile-long, $3.6 billion storm-surge barrier called the Oosterscheldekering, designed to withstand everything but a 10,000-year flood. An inscription reads, “Here the tide is ruled, by the wind, the moon and us.” This gives Fagan occasion to underscore his book’s second obvious but crucial point about sea level rise: the rich can build defenses against it; the poor cannot. Countries like Bangladesh or Kiribati can afford neither Dutch-style seawalls nor Dutch-style hubris, and readers—presumably English-speakers from moneyed
c o n t r i b u t o r s
Facing the Wave By Gretel Ehrlich, Pantheon, 240 pp., $25 near the narrow harbor of kamaishi, japan, a fisherman watches helplessly as a 30-foot-high wave, “black with diesel and gas, sewage, dirt, and blood,” crashes ashore and sweeps his 69-year-old father into the ocean. Several days later, he unzips a body bag in a temporary morgue and finds the old man’s body, tagged #59, one of the almost 16,000 who died in the March 2011 tsunami. With this image, Gretel Ehrlich embarks on a moving and poetic journey through the wreckage, probing into the lives of some of the survivors: farmers, fishermen, and monks, veterinarians who search for lost pets, an 84-year-old geisha determined to hand down a song that only she remembers. And looming over Ehrlich’s story is the ongoing disaster at the Fukushima nuclear plant, where workers still struggle, two years later, to stem the flow of radioactive wastewater.
Nile Delta, shrinking some parts building some of the planet’s first at a rate of up to 300 feet a year. dikes and seawalls. Storms still hit the Netherlands, Salinity is creeping in. A projected sea level rise of one foot by 2025 sometimes killing thousands of would flood 50,000 acres of prime people, but rather than move, the farmland. A rise of seven feet Dutch built the seawalls higher. would displace millions of people. Populations boomed, in part beThe history of humankind is cause agriculture is a far better way a history of laying down roots, than hunting to feed a lot of people. The paradox of greater security both real and metaphoric. Huntergatherers in Doggerland would in places like the Netherlands is simply have moved camp as that it can lead, in a roundabout way, to greater the water vulnerability. So encroached. Read ongoing coverage of sea level much more is They would rise and climate change at onearth.org/sum13/sealevel now behind the have done this
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countries—are forced to own up to this guilty reality too. For those with the resources, Fagan concludes, it is past time to start thinking about our own defenses: better weather forecasting and emergency response, floating neighborhoods, floodproof building codes, storm-surge barriers (so long as one neighborhood isn’t flooded to save another), restored wetlands (if it isn’t already too late). “We can no longer behave like ostriches with our heads in the sand,” he writes.
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reviews Earlier in The Attacking Ocean, Fagan notes another feature of the wealthier countries of the world: our policed, walled-off borders. This is the windup for his one truly surprising conclusion, which feels inevitable only once you have grappled with how
comparatively entrenched human civilization has become over 15,000 years and how expensive and logistically fraught it would be to seal off Asian cities and South Pacific island nations like Kiribati from the rising sea. The terms Fagan uses are “managed retreat” and “climatic migration.” In other words, if you’re poor and by the ocean, have some bags
packed, and remember Doggerland. If you’re rich, don’t build the border walls too high. The future, writes Fagan, will require “levels of international cooperation and funding to handle migration unheard of in today’s world.”
Imperial Dreams Tracking the Imperial Woodpecker Through the Wild Sierra Madre BY TIM GALLAGHER Atria Books, 306 pp., $26
McKenzie Funk’s book, Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming, is forthcoming from Penguin Press.
I’m a sucker for animal
spotlight
Fieldwork By Sanna Kannisto, Aperture, $50 The work of the young Finnish photographer Sanna Kannisto stands at the intersection of art and science. In the rainforests of Costa Rica, Brazil, and French Guiana, which serve as both her canvas and her field of study, Kannisto not only documents the richness of life but also challenges the ways in which we perceive it. Naturalistic images of the forest floor alternate with whimsical self-portraits of Kannisto as she hunts for specimens and shots of artificial assemblages in which snakes curl themselves around flowering plants in the photographer’s portable Plexiglas field studio. One remarkable sequence captures this bat feeding on nectar dripped from a test tube. A well-chosen quotation from the Japanese artist Hokusai serves as the book’s epigraph: “I notice that my characters, my animals, my insects, my fish, look as if they are escaping from the paper.”
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quests. Give me a good story about following a peregrine to South America, or tracking a snow leopard into the Himalayas, and I’ll gobble it up. The first line of Tim Gallagher’s Imperial Dreams did nothing to dampen my enthusiasm, describing the imperial woodpecker as a giant bird with vivid black-and-white coloring “whose pounding drumbeat echoed through the forests as it bored into passive pines, hammering on them powerfully for weeks until they groaned, shuddered, and finally toppled with an impact that shook the ground.” Yes! I was ready to go. The imperial woodpecker is considered extinct, yet there have been stray sightings in the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico over recent decades, and so Gallagher prepares to journey there, despite the fact that it is also the habitat of many Mexican drug lords. My first impression was that he was trying a little too hard to amp up the danger, describing the violence with a drumbeat as insistent as any woodpecker’s. But then, as stories about the atrocities of the drug wars piled up, I began instead to question his judgment. Why exactly are you going? Because the violence turns out
to be very real, Gallagher’s journeys proceed in fits and starts, mostly fits. The author is famous for his pursuit of the ivory-billed woodpecker, described in his earlier book, The Grail Bird, and though his claims of seeing that bird are controversial, there is no doubt the quest itself was thrilling. Here the thrill fades quickly. In the end I found this a depressing book, and not just for the obvious reason that imperial woodpeckers may in fact be extinct. Mexico turns out to be every bit as bad as Gallagher feared, and his every attempt at hiking into the bird’s mountainous home terrain seems to be blocked, cut short, or colored by some sort of murder, rape, or kidnapping by the local narcotraficantes. You want to yell to him: Get the hell out of there! The book’s high point occurs after the arrival of Martjan Lammertink, a Dutch birder who seems part Audubon, part Klaus Kinski. It might have been wise to focus the narrative solely on this fascinating character, who bristles with obsession and continues to hunt for the bird long after even he admits they are unlikely to find one. Still, admirably and (to the others in his party) maddeningly, he stops periodically to set up his homemade box contraption that mimics the woodpecker’s doubleknock drumming, hoping to lure in an actual bird. Sadly, even the sections starring Lammertink are overlaid with both the fear of death by gun and a strange ennui. I found myself admiring Tim Gallagher the man, but thinking that sometimes quests fail, and sometimes they don’t need to be written about. The reader will understand fairly early on that we are not going to be seeing any imperial woodpeckers, known locally as pitoreales. What we see instead is a ravaged landscape, trees felled by massive logging and burned down for the growing of opium poppies and marijuana, and a ravaged peo-
ple, cowering from the deadly bullies who profit from the fields. The birds knew the feeling: they too were persecuted, hunted for their feathers or just for fun. Most of the interviews with locals are simply sad retellings of how beautiful the birds once were, though Gallagher also discovers that logging companies might have sped their extinction by spreading poison on the pines the imperials favored. In the end the expedition exhausts and drains Gallagher, leaving him in a “deep funk,” and ultimately the reader feels the same way. We are left depressed about the state of nature, the state of Mexico, and the state of humanity. Like the author, we just want to go home.
—david gessner
animal wise The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures BY Virginia morell Crown, 291 pp., $26
H u m a n s h av e a l way s
dreamed of discovering an intelligence equal to our own—elsewhere in the universe. When we invented the radio we beamed it skyward, hoping to flag down sympathetic extraterrestrials. Meanwhile, here on Earth, we have largely—even pointedly— ignored the minds of the creatures with which (not, tellingly, with whom) we share the planet. Until recently, “the prevailing notion held that animals are more
like zombies or robotic machines” than sentient beings, Virginia Morell writes in Animal Wise. Just two or three decades ago, it was heresy for any scientist to suggest that a creature other than Homo might have “subjective or personal experiences.” But now, a growing body of re-
[
example of a nonhuman animal “teaching.” Each chapter that follows is the story of a reporting trip to visit a scientist in situ, and on every page nonhuman neurons achieve amazing feats of reasoning, ingenuity, and even empathy: a parrot understands the abstract concept of zero; elephants show
]
If our role were to live in the ocean and guzzle fish, we might happily trade our brains for the teeth and muscle of a great white shark
search is proving that intelligent life has been with us all along: crawling under rocks, nesting in trees, and swimming offshore. Morell, a frequent contributor to Science and National Geographic, visits laboratories and field sites to illuminate what scientists are uncovering about how animals large and small think. All the while she challenges our species’ view of itself as the most advanced and important form of life. “Evolution is not linear,” she writes, and thus “we are not the pinnacle of evolution.” Rather, each species has adapted to a particular ecological niche (or died trying). If our role were to live in the ocean and guzzle fish, for instance, we might happily trade our brains for the teeth and muscle of a great white shark. As for our supposedly superior minds, Morell encounters a chimpanzee—our closest genetic ancestor—that can memorize a string of numbers more rapidly than most people, including her. Touring the front lines of animal cognition research, Morell visits researchers who study how fish learn, whether birds have language, why rats laugh, and how dolphins construct their social lives. Animal Wise begins with one scientist’s controversial discovery that members of a rock-dwelling ant species tutor one another on how to get from an old nest to a new one—potentially the first
compassion toward their dying kin. The pleasure of these revelations tempts us to turn the page. But what’s missing is an overarching argument, a stronger authorial presence pushing beyond the facts to draw surprising conclusions. While Morell notes that the definitions of teaching, thinking, and consciousness are still up for debate, she doesn’t profile any researchers who clash over them and so might complicate one another’s findings. And though she raises impossible questions in passing, she doesn’t inspire us to grapple with them: What is it like to be an ant, or an elephant, or a fish? If we could converse with other species, as so many of the scientists in Animal Wise wish they could, what would we say? Morell argues that we owe the other denizens of Earth greater consideration in light of the fact that they, like us, can make decisions, express preferences, and feel pain, including, in several cases, what seems to be emotional anguish. But her inquiry never builds to a climax in which we’re forced to reckon fully with the existential implications of what we’ve learned. A book that purports to think about thinking shies away in the end from imagining how knowing the minds of other species might transform the way in which we experience the world.
—kim tingley
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Dispatches news and views from the natural resources defense council
a 26 percent solution There are cost-effective ways to clean up existing coal-fired power plants.
A clear path to cutting carbon pollution An innovative new plan would require power plants to dramatically reduce their greenhouse gas emissions
E
lectric power plants in the United
States pump out 2.4 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year—40 percent of our total carbon emissions. So you’d think that cutting back on the pollution produced by these plants would be a sure-fire way to reduce the nation’s carbon emissions. And you would be right. Except Congress has proven reluctant to pass legislation opposed by the coal and gas industries. Maybe it’s time for a new approach. NRDC’s climate and clean air program has drawn up an ambitious proposal that would bypass a recalcitrant Congress and allow President Obama to take meaningful action on his own. He can do so because Section 111(d) of the Clean Air Act, which regulates pollutants such as carbon dioxide not otherwise covered by the
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law, gives him the authority to regulate carbon emissions. “As it became clear that climate legislation wasn’t going to be enacted, we turned to what we could achieve with existing law,” says Dan Lashof, director of the program. NRDC’s plan would set specific targets for individual states to reduce their carbon emissions, taking into account that some states currently generate more power from coal than gas. The emissions standards under the plan, says Lashof, would compel power companies to install renewable energy technologies, such as wind turbines and solar panels. Some power plants might also choose to install energy-efficient technologies to reduce emissions from their coal-fired operations. If the Environmental Protection Agency mandates the standards suggested in this proposal, carbon emissions from power plants would drop by 26 percent from 2005 levels by the year 2020, helping
opposite: Shuli Hallak/corbis; Right: PhotoAlto sas/Alamy; Top right: Greg Ceo
the president reach his goal of decreasing greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent by 2020. An NRDC analysis calculates that the program would cost $4 billion in 2020. But Lashof points out that the proposal, according to NRDC estimates, would save at least $25 billion annually in health, property, and other damage caused by climate change. It would also save approximately 3,600 lives by reducing long-term exposure to pollutants that have been linked with cardiovascular and respiratory diseases as well as to carbon dioxide. After the EPA analyzes the NRDC proposal, Lashof expects the agency to present its own regulatory plan to the president before the end of this year. The EPA will then take public comments on that draft and publish a final version of the regulations sometime in 2014. This isn’t how the regulatory process usually works, says Lashof. Typically, the EPA will first publish a proposal to draw reactions from industry and environmental organizations. But in this instance, NRDC published its detailed proposal first and is waiting for a response from the EPA. Lashof can’t predict how much the EPA’s own proposal might, or might not, differ from NRDC’s, but he thinks it is promising that the agency is now carefully reviewing the plan. Although the EPA’s proposed regulations won’t require approval by Congress, Lashof still anticipates opposition from coal companies that prefer more lenient standards for carbon emissions. “The coal industry would fight such a proposal tooth and nail,” he says. “We’re gearing up for a major campaign to make sure that the Obama administration continues to move forward. We don’t need Congress to pass a law, but we need to make sure they don’t pass a law to interfere with the new standards.”
—eli chen
safe testing Most were college STUDENTS,
so spending one hour in a chamber on four consecutive days while pesticide vapors were pumped in probably seemed worth the $60 they got for the privilege. Others involved in the same experiment were administered 120 times the daily allowable limit set by the federal government for the pesticide chloropicrin, which had been used as a tear gas in World War I. The EPA’s Human Studies Review Board approved the tests, conducted in 2004 by re-
searchers at the University of California, San Diego. The EPA then relied on these data in setting safety standards for the chemical. But thanks to a lawsuit filed by NRDC and other public-interest groups, pesticide tests on human subjects will have to meet tighter safety standards to be submitted to the EPA. The lawsuit aimed to reduce the agency’s use of human experiments in setting pesticide safety standards, claiming such experiments were often unethical and unscientific in their methodology—if, for example, there were too few subjects or the subjects were unrepresentative of the general population. New rules, which went into effect April 15, “significantly strengthen the ethical and scientific standards for these experiments,” says Michael Wall, NRDC’s lead litigator in —Henry gass the case.
A victory for free speech
A
S the town clerk of Sanford, New York, began
her customary reading of the evening’s agenda, it seemed, at first, like just another routine gathering. But on September 11, 2012, the residents of the town— 100 miles southwest of Albany, population 2,407—got quite a jolt. Within minutes, four board members, who appeared more engaged by their meeting binders than by the group of citizens sitting before them, unanimously voted to ban discussion of fracking at meetings. When Supervisor Dewey Decker invited comments—on “anything other than gas”—several residents protested their sudden inability to speak on the subject. This is the first time a town board in the state has placed a formal ban on fracking discussions. “This isn’t about gas. This is about our right to free speech,” says Gail Musante, a member of the anti-fracking group SanfordOquaga Area Concerned Citizens. Perhaps it was no coincidence that a week prior to that meeting, Decker, who has leased his own land for fracking, wrote a letter to Andrew Cuomo, governor of New York, urging him to speed up natural gas development in Sanford. “Even though they’re banning people on both sides of the issue from talking, it’s clear from the board’s actions that they want to cut off discussion by those who oppose fracking,” says Kate Sinding, director of NRDC’s new Community Fracking Defense Project, which provides an array of tools to residents who don’t want fracking in their communities. In February, NRDC and Catskill Citizens for Safe Energy sued Sanford in U.S. District Court on grounds that the board was violating the First Amendment rights of the town’s citizens. The town first began leasing land for natural gas extraction in 2008, to a company called XTO Energy. While Sanford officials support fracking, residents are divided, with many worried about the impact on their health, farms, and property values. On April 9, the board rescinded the gag order. Sinding suspects that town officials decided that going to court would not in the end prove a wise investment of their time and money. NRDC, in turn, withdrew its lawsuit on April 17. “I think we demonstrated that public discussion of even a divisive issue like fracking need not disrupt town business,” says Sinding. “Towns can still find a way to conduct their meetings while allowing residents the right to share a variety of viewpoints on subjects —e.c. that concern their well-being.”
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TRUTH SQUAD
Oh, for the Love of Coal!
T
he coal industry continues to resist limits on carbon pollution and to undermine development of sustainable energy alternatives. In a March 2 letter to the editor in the Washington Post, the president of the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity claimed that U.S. coal plants benefit the economy and the environment. JOHN WALKE, director of NRDC’s clean air project, provides a much-needed reality check.
Columnist Eugene Robinson would have President Obama use executive power to shutter our nation’s coal plants, wit h little regard to the impact on the economy—o r on the environment [“Let the coal fire die out,” op-ed, Feb. 26].
M is le ad ing
More than $100 billion has been invested to make electricity from coal almost 90 percent cleaner than it was 40 years ago . We have more than a dozen clean-coal techno logies to thank for Chut zpah alert! this progress. Turning our backs on coal and clean-coal technologies wou ld give countries such as India and China a huge advantage over the United States, which has the largest coal reserves in the world. Global energy demand is goi ng to increase by 50 percent over the next 25 years, and that demand cannot be met withou t coal. Those who value a clean environment and a strong economy should be looking for ways to use coal even more cleanly instead of abandoning clean coal to other countries.
* Setting sensible
carbon-pollution limits for coal plants under the Clean Air Act will not shutter all U.S. coal plants. Rather, it will require new plants to be as clean as natural-gas plants and set achievable standards for existing fossil-fuel plants.
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* Coal-burning power plants do nothing to control their global warming pollution. These plants must now reduce their mercury and toxic air pollution by 90 percent by 2015—but only because industry was forced to do so by the EPA.
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*We actually have
the Clean Air Act to thank for this progress. The letter wins the chutzpah award: for 40 years the coal and power lobbies have fought the clean air safeguards that yielded progress— and they still are fighting.
*In the U.S., renew-
able energy, natural gas, and simple economics have steadily reduced demand for electricity generated by coal. California is on track to use no coal-based electricity by 2025. Cleanenergy technologies can produce both good jobs here and energy for export.
Wild for Wildlife While seeing polar bears in
their natural habitat is still on her to-do list, Elissa Querze is working to prevent their slide into extinction, not just during her lifetime but for future generations too. “I love animals, especially polar bears,” she says, “so it horrifies me that these creatures are endangered. Too many people are unaware of the plight of animals pursued for their tusks, claws, and fur. Of course, disappearing habitat and climate change are also culprits.” That’s why Elissa puts her trust in NRDC. “I respect what the organization does on a range of issues,” she says, “from the impact of fracking on our water supply to the protection of wilderness and wildlife, including the lethal threats confronting the American gray wolf. And NRDC’s use of litigation as a key strategy impresses me.” Elissa, a member of NRDC from its earliest days, is a committed activist, writing letters to those in power and standing up to be counted. “It’s up to each of us to do whatever we can,” she says. Elissa has long supported NRDC with annual gifts and has extended her commitment by making a bequest in her will. “I want to leave a legacy for the next generation and the generation after that,” she says. 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
the coast is clearer
Karen Garrison helped conceive a network of underwater sanctuaries.
A SEA CHANGE Thanks to one ocean scientist’s efforts, California’s marine life has its own protected “park system”
photograph for onearth by toby burditt
G
by laura fraser
rowing up in southern New Jersey in
the 1950s, Karen Garrison spent summers at the seashore, swimming, body surfing, beachcombing, and digging for the clams her grandmother would eat raw. “I would have lived underwater if that had been an option,” she says. Today Garrison, NRDC’s senior oceans policy analyst, still loves the sea; her generously windowed office in San Francisco, with its blue-green hues (thanks to posters of fish on the walls), gives off an aquarium-like vibe. But in adulthood, her passion has taken the form of advocacy and protection. For the past 15 years, Garrison has spearheaded efforts to create a string of protected marine areas along the coast of California. She has been a vital presence in the establishment of what is, for all practical purposes, an underwater park system. “We’ve had parks and wilderness areas on land for decades, but we’re having to play catch-up with the ocean,” says Garrison. “Now
who we are
what we do
California is making up for lost of fish observed over the course time.” Garrison and NRDC were of 15 years—a convalescence a critical force behind the 1999 that was also marked by the reMarine Life Protection Act, turn of some species that had which established a statewide vanished from the area entirely. framework for a network of Now, thanks in part to Garrison’s undersea preserves where efforts, fully 16 percent of Califishing and industrial activity fornia’s marine waters and their would be restricted to allow wildlife habitats are similarly depleted marine life to recu- protected. National Geographic perate. Last December—after Society explorer-in-residence years of negotiations among sci- Sylvia Earle refers to these areas entists, commercial and sport fish- as “hope spots.” But getting to this point wasn’t ermen, surfers, activists, Native American tribes, and practically easy. Initially, when the state proeveryone else with a stake in the posed protected areas, “all hell ocean—California approved un- broke loose,” says Garrison. It derwater parks in the last of four was a lengthy process to bring inplanning regions, thereby com- terested parties to the negotiating pleting the state’s 848-square-mile table and find common ground. system of marine protected areas. “What we all shared was a passion “The state has created a whole for the ocean,” she says. Groups necklace of protected biological of citizens, operating within scigems along its coastline,” says entific guidelines, helped design Garrison. Recreation-minded the protected areas and now have visitors can still swim, kayak, and a real stake in maintaining them. relax at the beach in these areas; “I got into this work because I they just can’t remove any form was so thrilled with the amazing of marine life. “It’s analogous to variety of life in our oceans,” says a wilderness area, where you can Garrison, who lists scuba diving take only photographs and leave as a favorite pastime. “Little did I know I’d become so deeply only footprints,” she adds. By the 1990s, when Garrison engaged with the human part of helped launch NRDC’s oceans ecosystems.” In recognition of her efforts, program, cycles of boom-and-bust fishing had already caused aba- Garrison has received a Peter lone, giant sea bass, and rockfish Benchley Ocean Award and was named a Hero populations to plummet along Visit switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/ of the Seas by kgarrison for more on our oceans the Blue Fronthe California tier Campaign, coast. Less than 1 percent of the state’s waters an organization dedicated to were protected. Overfished ar- ocean and coastal preservation. eas had simply not been given the She maintains that she shares the award with many others. “It’s an chance to recover. Scientists know that marine honor for NRDC, and for the peolife can flourish again in depleted ple of California,” she says. “If we waters once preserves are estab- didn’t all love the oceans enough lished. One protected area in the to stand up for them, this amazing Sea of Cortez saw an enormous new network of underwater parks increase in the size and number wouldn’t exist.”
summer 2013
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open space the prodigal daughter
American road trip. But when I mentioned my hometown, his mood That’s Po-KIP-see, if you please; rhymes with tipsy and shifted. “Oh!” he said, with what sounded almost like pleasant surprise. I laughed, assuming sarcasm, but Kunstler was perfectly serious. gypsy. Forgive me if I sound a bit defensive. Poughkeepsie, New York, you see, has a reputation for being In a hotter, drier, less climatically stable future, he said, medium-size towns like Poughkeepsie will be just right. “We’ll see people moving to a particularly awful little place. It wasn’t always so. Poughkeepsie was once a busy places that are scaled appropriately to our energy diet,” he said—comport on the Hudson River, and its residents made a good living munities small enough to walk across, but big enough to pool their resources for needed infrastructure. shipping beer and factory goods downPoughkeepsie is also close to good stream to Manhattan. But that was well farmland and freshwater, he pointed over a century ago. When river shipping out, and the Hudson might be useful went out of style, so did Poughkeepsie, for carbon-free transport too. “Towns and its core decayed. Despite periodic like Poughkeepsie are at their nadir attempts at revitalization—a pedestrian now,” he conceded, “but they have a mall, a waterfront makeover, outdoor lot of virtues that are going to become murals—the town settled into a apparent in the years ahead.” stubborn slump, its center marked Virtues? This was new. Kunstler was with empty-eyed brick buildings and hinting that I should pack up and head quiet streets. home? In all my years of reporting on Poughkeepsie became a kind of the many effects of climate change, inverse suburb, a place with all the I’d never foreseen a one-way ticket to disadvantages of both the city and the my iconically undesirable native sod. country. Crime was high, and there I had to admit, though, that Kunstler was nothing to do. Gene Hackman had a point. My current home on the made the town a punch line with his edge of the Colorado Plateau is com“Pickin’ your feet in Poughkeepsie” fortably distant from the interstate, and rant in The French Connection, and it beautiful in a stark, desert-like way. But was still a joke years later when Ally as the climate changes, so might my McBeal lawyer John Cage stopped his notions of livability, even beauty. Peace bouts of stuttering by yelling “Poughand quiet is appealing when one has keepsie!” In the movie Sex and the enough fuel to escape it; the desert is City, Charlotte was reported to have Towns like Poughkeepsie are at beautiful when one has plenty to drink. “Poughkeepsie’d in her pants.” their nadir now, but they have a lot Late last summer, I spent a few days Maybe you can see why we natives of virtues that are going to become visiting family in Poughkeepsie. It was feel a little defensive. humid and almost blindingly green, the Defensive or no, a lot of us quietly apparent in the years ahead trees hanging low over sidewalks. Main agree with the consensus. I know that as a teenager, I did: I thought Poughkeepsie was boring and ugly, with its Street looked a little livelier, with a row of Mexican grocery stores on one gray skies, low hills, and flat, gray river. I left as soon as I could, heading block and an upscale bistro on the next. The abandoned railroad bridge to college in Oregon and then settling in the Southwest, where I fell for across the Hudson, a skeletal silhouette all through my childhood, had the sunshine and the topography. I returned to Poughkeepsie to visit recently been repaired and reopened as a footpath, and it was crowded friends and family, but never seriously considered a longer stay. As a with locals enjoying its dramatic river vantage. I took my 4-year-old daughter to the edge of Wappinger Creek, which fellow exile once told me, “It’s not hard to do better than Poughkeepsie.” A few years ago, though, I interviewed the author and social critic flows into the Hudson just south of Poughkeepsie. She waded happily James Kunstler about his novel World Made by Hand, his latest por- into the shallow water, flinging sticks into the current. She was beautiful. Poughkeepsie wasn’t. But for the first time, I trayal of a post-peak-oil future. Kunstler, famously crotchety, had plenty of pithy complaints about suburbs, Cheez Doodles, Walmart, and the imagined that it might be. ’m from a town called Poughkeepsie.
6 4 onearth
summer 2013
illustration by Leo Acadia
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Michelle Nijhuis
Photo: Green Mountain near Aspen, CO. © Tim Fitzharris
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