Life at the bottom of the food chain p.54
A Survival Guide for the Planet • published by the natural resources defense council
PosEidon Lost
The End of a Myth
WE THOUGHT THE SEA WAS INFINITE AND INEXHAUSTIBLE. IT IS NOT. JULIA WHITTY CALLS FOR A NEW VISION TO SAVE OUR OCEANS.
PLUS India Calling: THE GREEN CELL PHONE REVOLUTION spring 2012 w w w.one arth.org
Blades & Feathers: Wind Turbines that Don’t Kill The Other America: Thirst in the land of plenty
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contents
Onearth magazine
volume 34 number 1 spring 2012
FE ATU RES
d epar t m ents
28 India Calling by George Black
What if corporate executives and unschooled women in remote villages could join forces to change the world? In India, that may be happening— thanks to the cell phone.
cover story
39
A beekeeper’s discovery could help save our bees from a massive dieoff. Plus, the Atlanta Falcons’ Ovie Mughelli, eco All-Pro; and more.
Q&A It’s not easy to compare the value of a job on an oil rig and the value of an acre of eelgrass. Mary Ruckelshaus thinks she may have a way of doing just that.
44 In-Flight Safety Information
24 the synthesist
by Studio 2a
Everyone wants wind farms. The only problem is that they kill lots of birds and bats. Here are some ideas for getting clean energy without the carnage.
by Alan Burdick The data trail from our cell phones contains a treasure trove of digital information. Some of it could be lifesaving.
26 living green
46 Not a Drop To Drink
by Robert Moor One man fesses up to his tortured relationship with his cool ultralight hiking gear.
by Elizabeth Royte
The rich farmlands of California’s Central Valley are nourished by billions of gallons of pure H2O. Yet those who toil in the fields can’t drink the tainted water from their own faucets.
“The ocean is our blind spot: a deep, dark, distant, and complex realm covering 70.8 percent of Earth’s surface. We have better maps of Mars than of our own sea floor.”
poe try
14 The Porcupine Quill by David Wagoner
by Julia Whitty
by Donald Hall
we have held certain truths to be self-evident: that the
visit onearth.org
tia magallon
The End of a Myth
56 Freezes and Junes onearth online Read the digital edition of the magazine on your computer, e-reader, or tablet device, and access complete back issues at onearth.org/digital
8 From the Editor 14 Letters 17 FRONTLINES
Ever since the first humans gazed, awed, out to sea, ocean is infinite, inexhaustible, boundlessly tolerant of
54 reviews
Who puts all that food on our table? An invisible army of millions of underpaid workers.
64 open space
by Rick Bass Going eyeball-to-eyeball with an elephant is a reminder that what is wondrous can also be terrifying.
insid e n r dc
10 view from nrdc
whatever abuse we may hurl at it. Wrong. The ocean
by Frances Beinecke
is much more fragile than we ever realized, and a new
12 the deans list
vision of its future is long overdue. The clock is ticking.
by Bob Deans
58 dispatches Cover: Photographed for OnEarth by Tia Magallon.
The grizzly’s fight for survival, antibiotics in our food, and more.
spri n g 2 0 1 2
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volume 34
number 1
spring 2012
Find links to everything on this page at onearth.org/web
4co nne ct with u s Get our newsletter onearth.org/newsletter On Facebook onearth.org/facebook On Twitter twitter.com/onearthmag On the iPad onearth.org/ipad
4WE B
This rescued moon bear will live out its days at a rehabilitation center in China.
E X C LU S I V E S
Save the Moon Bear
Across China and Vietnam, thousands of endangered moon bears spend their lives locked up in tiny cages, where their gall bladders are drained for a liquid prized in traditional Chinese medicine. One woman is on a mission to free them. onearth.org/moonbears
A Change of View
David Gessner’s first reaction to a wind farm off the shores of Cape Cod? Not in my backyard! But as the project has struggled, Gessner has seen the damage done by our lust for fossil fuels and come to grips with the need for change. onearth.org/12spr/capewind
Plundering the Plains
A fracking frenzy has put sparsely populated North Dakota at the epicenter of a drilling boom that is sweeping the Great Plains—even as government regulators scramble to keep up and protect land, communities, and drinking water. onearth.org/dakotaboom
ABOVE: barry yeoman; right: tOM BROWN/ISTOCK
4F E A T URE D
BLOGS
cinema paradiso OnEarth contributing editor BRUCE BARCOTT soaks in the
snow, celebrities, and serious environmental messages on display at the world-famous Sundance Film Festival. onearth.org/12spr/sundance
4most pop ular Thoreau Would Not Buy a Prius
Climate Change Health Costs Add Up to One Huge Bill No More Tears: Johnson & Johnson to Phase Out Formaldehyde Watch 131 Years of Global Warming in 26 Seconds The Planet Was Not Harmed During the Making of This Film
More online-only stories: onearth.org/webexclusives
On Tumblr onearth.tumblr.com On the Kindle onearth.org/kindle Digital edition onearth.org/digital Your comments onearth.org/community Your nature photos onearth.org/photocontest Winners appear in the magazine—see p. 61 for this issue’s pick.
onearth.org/blog THAT SUPERBUG PROBLEM
PARKS AND REHYDRATION
The FDA knows that feeding antibiotics to livestock—for growth, not to cure disease— poses a human health risk. Still, the agency is doing nothing to stop the practice. onearth.org/12spr/antibiotics
Grand Canyon National Park wanted to clean up litter by ending sales of water in plastic bottles. Then Coke— distributor of Dasani and a big park benefactor—objected. onearth.org/12spr/coke
spring 2012
onearth 5
contributors agnès dherbeys (“India Calling,” p. 28) grew up in France and currently works in Bangkok. Her photography, covering subjects from AIDS patients to street prostitutes, has garnered numerous awards and grants. In 2010 she won the Robert Capa Gold Medal for her coverage of Thailand’s Red Shirt protests. tom philpott (“Our Unhappy Meals,” p. 54) is a co-founder of Maverick Farms, a North Carolina–based sustainable farm and food education center. Philpott’s writing on the politics of food has appeared in the Guardian, Newsweek, and other publications. A former columnist and editor at Grist, he now writes the “Food for Thought” blog for Mother Jones. cynthia perez (“Not a Drop to Drink,” p. 46) lives in Los Angeles with her three children. Her photography, which focuses on children and families in their domestic environment, has been featured in ads for many leading companies, including Disney, Pampers, and Crayola. This is her first assignment for OnEarth. julia whitty (“The End of a Myth,” p. 39) is a filmmaker with more than 70 nature documentaries to her credit and the author of several books, including the award-winning The Fragile Edge: Diving and Other Adventures in the South Pacific (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). She is currently an environmental reporter for Mother Jones. 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.
dherbeys: george black; philpott: hillary wilson.
A Bright Green Start
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editor’s letter How i see the oceans now
O
h, the turbulent seas! Immense spinning gyres of plastic detritus;
roiling tides of chemical pollutants; carbon dioxide acidifying the oceans; plummeting fish populations. I admit, it sounds a bit grim. But here’s the simple truth: whatever we dump into the ocean stays in the ocean. A seemingly obvious concept, until you examine its implications. Throughout the entire stretch of human history, that sense of limitation never arose even as a flicker of a thought. The sea, we believed, was nothing if not infinite in its bounty and mystery. As a corollary, whatever was removed from the sea would simply be replenished. (Evidence to the contrary began to emerge rather recently; one study calculates that we have depleted up to a third of the world’s fisheries.) Staggeringly apparent is that twentyfirst-century humankind must adopt “Only of late have we learned to see its nothing less than an entirely new vision of vulnerabilities.Yet our behavior lags the seas. Until now, we have been misled by the resilience of the ocean: it seemed far behind our understanding, and the always able to absorb our thoughtlessocean awaits our enlightened action” ness into its churning amplitude. But we need to relinquish this antiquated myth and instead view the ocean as finite, limited, circumscribed—quite the opposite of how we viscerally experience it as we stand on its shores looking outward to a vanishing horizon, or as we voyage from one distant land mass to another. We asked JULIA WHITTY, the talented author of Deep Blue Home, to explore this important new paradigm for us. And she does so, beautifully, in our cover story, “The End of a Myth.” She writes, “Only of late have we learned to see the ocean’s surprising vulnerabilities. That it’s the beleaguered terminus of all our downstream pollutants, part of a dynamic system intensely interactive with land and atmosphere and everything we do there. Only in the past decade has science discovered the ocean to be fragile in the way only really enormous things are fragile: with resilience teetering on the brink of collapse. Yet our behavior lags far behind our understanding, and the ocean awaits our enlightened action.” In an enlightened society, every video screen and billboard would blare this urgent message in a massive public-information campaign: SAVE OUR SEAS! But, hey, it hasn’t happened for climate change, has it? Perhaps, though, the plight of the oceans will provoke a different response as more and more folks go down to the shore and find their favorite beach is closed because petroleum tar balls have washed up onto it; or raw sewage has overflowed into it after a heavy rain; or dangerous algal blooms (“red tides”) have made swimming dangerous. Or perhaps the delicious fish they and their grandparents and grandparents’ parents have always enjoyed are no longer available to them. Yes, the ocean awaits our enlightened action, and we hope Whitty’s gorgeous essay helps begin an important conversation. Discuss, e-mail, tweet her article. Tell your fellow Earthlings that the time has arrived.
8 onearth
spring 2012
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W
a new clean air rule worth fighting for hen I talk to parents of young children about my work, they
francEs beinecke, President
1 0 onearth
spring 2012
Matt Greenslade/photo-nyc.com
often ask about mercury pollution. They know it’s dangerous to pregnant women and children but are unsure how to keep their loved ones safe from harm. Luckily, the job of protecting families from these hazards just got a lot easier. In December the Environmental Protection Agency announced the first-ever national standards to reduce mercury, lead, and other dangerous pollution from power plants. These safeguards could prove to be among the Obama administration’s most significant environmental accomplishments. Mercury is a potent Almost every major industry has neurotoxin that damages the developing been subject to mercury standards for brain in fetuses and children. Prenatal exposure to even low levels of mercury more than 10 years. Utilities resisted, can have life-long effects on language but we refused to let them off the hook. skills, fine motor function, and the ability to pay attention. Coal-fired power plants are the largest industrial source of mercury emissions. These end up in waterways, where they are converted into methylmercury and ingested by fish. When we eat these fish, we absorb traces of methylmercury into our own bloodstream. A National Research Council study found that when women consume large amounts of seafood during pregnancy, the exposure to mercury is likely to increase the number of children “who struggle to keep up in school and might require remedial classes or special education.” Every other major industrial sector in the United States has been subject to mercury standards for more than 10 years. Utilities resisted, but NRDC refused to let them off the hook. Together with the attorneys general of several Northeast states downwind from heavily polluting coal-fired power plants in the Midwest, we sued the federal government. In 2008, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit ruled that the EPA must require deep cuts in mercury and other toxics from power plants. Under the leadership of EPA administrator Lisa Jackson, the agency has honored that ruling by issuing its new standards. This triumph is in part a testament to NRDC’s staying power: we fight polluters until we win. We are doing the same in our fight against the Keystone XL pipeline. Two years ago, we were told that the construction of a 1,700-mile-long pipeline to carry dirty tar-sands oil from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico was a foregone conclusion. But we fought back—in Washington, in communities that would have been directly threatened, and in the media. In January, President Obama rejected the pipeline. We will have to protect this victory from attacks in Congress, just as we have had to do with the Clean Air Act protections we recently won. But with your continued support and activism, we will continue the battle to keep our families safe from harm.
Create Your Own Lasting Legacy
Š Charles Gurche
You can create your own lasting legacy when you include NRDC in your estate plans. A gift through your will, trust, retirement or life insurance plan will help preserve our magnificent natural heritage and protect the planet 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, Senior Gift Planning Specialist, at 212-727-4552 or email her at legacygifts@nrdc.org.
www.nrdc.org/legacygift
the deans list
by bob deans
Big Coal, cold Cash, and the GOP Coal from destroying Appalachian mountains and streams. The vote was 240 to 182, with 223 Republicans backing the coal mining has been part of life in West Virginia’s Logan County. measure and 168 Democrats opposed. That lopsided party-line vote was part of a much wider But when the Mingo Logan Coal Company (a subsidiary of the campaign in the House. Over the course of 2011, House $3.2 billion behemoth Arch Coal) Republican leaders ordered an astonishing 191 votes—in proposed to blast away nearly 2,300 committees and before the full chamber—to weaken, delay, acres of ancient mountains and bury or derail the regulatory safeguards we all rely on to preserve forever seven miles of Appalachian our environment and our health. Like McKinley’s coal mine waterways beneath rock, dirt, and measure, most of these efforts haven’t made it through the toxic mining waste, even locals were shocked by the destruc- Senate and its Democratic majority. Democrats, though, aren’t the only ones alarmed by the GOP’s anti-environment tive reach of the plan. Paula Swearengin, who lives outside of Beckley, in the blitz in the House. “I’ve been appalled,” said former New Jersey governor heart of coal country once mined by her father and his father before him, spoke for many of her neighbors when she stood Christine Todd Whitman, a Republican who served as EPA up at a 2010 public hearing and said, “The coal industry administrator under President George W. Bush. “Republicans have been part will get their piece of of the environmental the pie. But it doesn’t movement since the make it right for comDavid McKinley of West Virginia get-go,” she told me, panies to bury our received more contributions from coal “and it just drives me rivers and streams, mining interests last year—$153,378— nuts that we now seem poisoning our children than any other member of Congress to be walking away and destroying comfrom it as if it were munities. Clean water something bad or we should not be an option in America; it’s a right. And a miner should not have to choose don’t believe in science or the environment.” In the long train of GOP votes last year, the McKinley bill between poisoning his child and his job.” The Environmental Protection Agency agreed. In January in particular ripped through the heart of West Virginia coal 2011 it withdrew the company’s waste disposal permit, con- country like dynamite blasting open a seam. After all, two cluding that the project “would use destructive and unsustain- years after the 2010 explosion that killed 29 West Virginia able mining practices that jeopardize the health of Appalachian workers at the Upper Big Branch mine, neither the House nor the Senate has gotten around to strengthening mining safety communities and clean water on which they depend.” But the story didn’t end there. The standards. And yet, when coal company profits were put at visit onearth.org coal industry’s man in Washington— risk, the House took action within weeks. to read Bob Deans’s weekly guide to environmental politics in Washington. “I think we have the best-paid politicians that the coal Representative David McKinley, onearth.org/thedeanslist Republican of West Virginia—im- industry can buy,” Paula Swearengin said when we spoke mediately introduced a spending bill amendment to block recently. “The people of Appalachia are treated like we’re the EPA from pulling the permit. McKinley, a first-term just disposable casualties of the coal industry. We live in the representative, received more political contributions from land of the lost, because nobody wants to hear us.” coal mining interests last year—$153,378—than any other member of Congress, according to the nonpartisan Center Bob Deans, NRDC’s associate director of communications, is a vetfor Responsive Politics. eran newspaper reporter and a former president of the White House And so, a month after the EPA decision, a bitterly divided Correspondents’ Association. His new book, Reckless: The Political House voted to strip the agency of its authority to prevent Arch Assault on the American Environment, is due out this spring.
1 2 onearth
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illustration by bruce morser
For more than a century,
Sustainable Transport
Photo: Russ Roca
the joys of kids lit
victory gardens “The Constant Gardeners” by Jocelyn C. Zuckerman (Winter 2011/2012) was fascinating. Kenyans have so little yet produce so much. Here in the United States, we have so much and produce so little on our little plots of land, and mostly what we produce is grass. If lawns were turned into gardens here, I wonder what the environmental impact would be. Nairobi should be an example for us. —Tom Marx posted online at OnEarth.org It’s great to hear about people using their resourcefulness to improve their lives under such difficult circumstances, and that governments are warming to the urban ag idea. Whether in Nairobi or Detroit, it’s a movement in the right direction. —Becky posted online at OnEarth.org A note from the editors: Zuckerman’s story really blossomed in the blogosphere. In the New York Times’s “Diner’s Journal,” for example, Jeff Gordinier called it “a richly reported, thought-provoking look at climate change, poverty, and urban farming in Africa.”
1 4 onearth
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Thank you so much for Sharman Russell’s wonderful article “Born to Be Wild” (Winter 2011-2012). As a school librarian who still gets to read children’s books for my job and as someone who, like Russell, spent her childhood devouring books, I really related. I am greatly concerned by how little today’s children are connected to nature, and Russell’s article reinforced my belief that part of my job is to help them make that connection. —Maureen from ma posted online at OnEarth.org
pedal to the metal After reading Adam Aston’s book review (“High Voltage,” Winter 2011/2012), I find myself on the fence. We need to think of the electric vehicle not as a savior but as a piece of the puzzle, or part of the solution. If we fail to address all the surrounding issues, such as coal-fired power plants and the materials used to make cars, electric vehicles will not make a significant impact. They cannot be the only driving force for change when it comes to foreign oil dependency and air pollution. —akin to green posted online at OnEarth.org
this just in Shortly after we published Bruce Stutz’s article about the plight of the Atlantic sturgeon (“Creature of the Deep,” Winter 2011-2012), the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) listed four sturgeon species as endangered and one as threatened. Read more at onearth.org/blog/fish-victorynoaa-listsatlantic-sturgeon-as-endangered.
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The Porcupine Quill If pawed at or just nudged it surrenders its whole long self from the root where it was born and begins a one-way journey through the skin and the inner ingredients of some tormentor, knowing exactly how and where its point should go to find another way out by using its tightly hinged fish-scale thin barbs like fins to swim through a sea of blood, and if its new, outraged, temporary possessor should decide it has to come back now in the other direction and pulls at it with teeth or yanks at it with bare hands, he, she, or it will be taking along whatever flesh may be there for the taking, while its quiet, amiable previous owner walks slowly away with an easy, dignified air of forgiveness but no sign of pity. —B y D av i d Wag on er
illustration by blair thornley
backtalk
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SPRING 2 0 1 2
illustration by RAFAEL RICOY; STATISTICS: CONGRESSIONAL RESEARCH SERVICE (1,2), USDA AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH SERVICE (3)
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
THE lATEST BUZZ ON BEES
A by eric scigliano
While scientists speculate about what role a certain pathogen plays in the collapse of bee colonies, one beekeeper went looking for clues—and made a remarkable discovery
As scientists debated Nosema ceranae’s role in the CCD mystery, Dan Harvey, a Washington State beekeeper, gloomily absorbed studying colony collapse disorder, the synreports that his wet corner of the Pacific Northwest was likely a perdrome in which most of the honeybees in fect incubator for the ravaging fungus. After many years of breeding a colony die or disappear without warndisease-free bees, Harvey saw at least 90 percent of his stock disappear ing, discovered a new potential culprit: in the winter of 2007–2008. The same percentage a fungal pathogen called visit onearth.org died the following year. That devastating one-two Nosema ceranae. While to read more about beekeeper Dan Harvey and his hardy hives. punch threatened to destroy his entire livelihood. they didn’t believe it was onearth.org/12spr/beekeeper But Harvey wasn’t about to give up. For years he’d the sole cause of colony crossbred his commercial stock with hardy local feral bees—the collapse disorder, or CCD, evidence suggested that it played a descendants of hives cultivated by early-twentieth-century home-part in this epidemic, which has had severe effects on American steaders—that had survived in the harsh environment of the Olympic agriculture. (Honeybee pollination is responsible for a third of the Peninsula rainforest. This crossbreeding had yielded a stock that food we eat; crops that rely on it are valued at $15 billion annually.)
100
bout five years ago, researchers
percentage of u.s. apple, broccoli, and carrot crops dependent on pollination
90
percentage of pollinators for these crops that are honeybees
50
percentage by which u.s. managed-bee population has declined since 1940
spring 2012
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F RONTLIN E S
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For the better part of two years Harvey tramped through the forest, ‘just catching bees off flowers’
SWEET RE-LEAF Looking for an alternative to Styrofoam or plastic party supplies? VerTerra makes singleuse dinnerware that’s crafted from only two materials: fallen leaves and water. Its plates, trays, and bowls are surprisingly durable, gorgeously sleek, and 100 percent compostable. Visit verterra.com. good find
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wild swarm. I knew they had to be survivor stock.” Harvey brought some bees back to his beeyard, where he and his wife, Judy, crossbred them with stock from other colonies—including one whose queen, he notes, will eject any varroa-infested brood from her hive. Now USDA researchers are testing the results of Harvey’s crossbreeding techniques, trying to determine how well, not to mention why, these bees are handling pathogens that have destroyed other colonies. “Dan Harvey is the only person I’ve heard of who thinks he might have bees with resistance to Nosema ceranae,” says Bob Danka, a USDA research entomologist. “He probably has the clearest sense of variance and susceptibility of anyone around.” Meanwhile, Dan Harvey continues to raise his crossbred bees without using chemical miticides and pesticides, which he believes can act as stressors and hamper the process of natural selection. His hives, once decimated, seem to be on the rebound. The result of this citizen-scientist’s efforts might just be a honeybee that can stand up to two of the greatest scourges known to apian science—and conceivably even a honeybee that could help researchers unlock the mystery of CCD, and send it buzzing into the past. Pretty sweet. eric scigliano has written on Pacific Northwest environmental issues for more than 20 years.
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TIME FLOWS If George Jetson had owned an alarm clock, it might have looked something like the Squirt. The wireless and battery-less cutie runs on nothing but good old H20. $26 at bedolwhatsnext.com.
jered lawson
was resistant to the common but deadly varroa mite, a parasite that has also been implicated in CCD. Harvey wondered if there might exist, somewhere in his neck of the woods, wild bees that had developed a resistance or tolerance to Nosema ceranae. For the better part of two years Harvey tramped through the forest, “just catching bees off flowers,” and, with the help of scientists at Washington State University and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, testing them for the fungus. And then one day, in a patch of young forest not far from his hometown of Port Angeles, Harvey found something remarkable: a feral colony that had somehow managed to remain entirely Nosema ceranae–free. “I called them the bear bees, because a huge bear knocked the bait hive over,” he says. But these bees had withstood far worse threats than bear attacks. “Nosema ceranae was everywhere, except this one
SOLVING FOR PIE
I
f you ask most urban kids where pie comes from, they’ll probably mention the store or the
bakery. But those who have visited Pie Ranch, an hour south of San Francisco, have a completely different perspective. There students engage in the entire pie-making process—starting with picking the fruit, gathering the eggs, and threshing the wheat—and end up with a piece of the pie and a new understanding of how their food is produced. Jered Lawson, Nancy Vail, and Karen Heisler established the working farm in 2003 as a place where kids from local high schools could receive hands-on lessons about the food system, from seed or egg to table, in a peaceful, pastoral environment. (There’s no cellphone reception in these coastal hills, but plenty of goats grazing on eucalyptus and poison oak.) The nonprofit organization works with area teachers, who bring students to the farm every season throughout the school year to learn about biology, environmental science, and nutrition up close: planting, tending, and harvesting crops; reading the conditions of soil, wind, and water; and cooking from scratch. “In recent American history, most young people have worked to get off the farm,” Lawson says. “We want to bring them back.” Visit pieranch.org. —laura fraser
sea DEBRIS
O
ur oceans are filled with plants, animals, and, increasingly, trash— especially plastic bottles, bags, and foodware. Along with cigarettes, glass bottles, and aluminum cans, too many household plastics are being deposited onto our beaches and into our water. The items in this chart make up almost eight in every ten pieces of ocean debris, according to the Ocean Conservancy. plastic bottles, bags, cutlery, cups, plates, straws, stirrers, containers, food wrappers, caps, and lids
cigarettes and filters glass beverage bottles Metal beverage cans
32% 4%4%
38%
Other
F RONTLIN E S
based in Seattle, where she spoke with OnEarth contributing editor Bruce Barcott. How did you go from salmon recovery to the Natural Capital Project?
At NOAA, we realized that if you’re trying to recover a species or an ecosystem, you have to engage the public to help solve the problem. You can’t ignore the people side of what you’re trying to do. NOAA decided to have the federal government identify the goal but let the wider community
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Politicians are barraged by competing interests arguing that their particular use of a natural resource is the best and highest value
Mary Ruckelshaus hopes to resolve thorny economic arguments.
number cruncher What matters more? Jobs in tourism? Offshore oil drilling? Fish habitat? Maybe computers can provide the answer. environmental policy is some-
thing of a family business for Mary Ruckelshaus. Her father, the attorney William Ruckelshaus, became the first administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency in 1970, when she was in fourth grade, and returned for a second an interview with term in the mid-1980s. “We had a lot mary ruckelshaus of great dinner table discussions,” she by bruce barcott recalls, but her own interest was in science more than legal policy. A Ph.D. in biology led her to Seattle, where she worked on salmon and orca recovery for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In 2010 she became managing director of the Natural Capital Project, an environmental think tank based at Stanford University. Advancing ideas developed by co-founder Gretchen Daily in her groundbreaking books Nature’s Services and The New Economy of Nature, the project’s team of biologists, economists, data analysts, and legal scholars collaborates with governments and NGOs to fairly value ecosystem services—the value of healthy marsh grass to Louisiana’s shrimp industry, for instance— in the planning and permitting of new development. Ruckelshaus is
spring 2012
decide how to get there. With salmon and orcas there are so many possible avenues to restoration. You could cut down salmon harvest; you could change agricultural or industrial practices; you could reduce pollution; and so on. There are different combinations, and NOAA decided to let the most impacted communities decide which one to use. Anne Guerry, a colleague at NOAA, and I started working on ecosystem services as they related to Puget Sound, looking at things like changes in crab habitat and how eelgrass stores carbon emissions. We worked with colleagues at the Natural Capital Project on that, and eventually they asked if we’d help build a marine component of InVEST, their computer modeling program. How exactly does computer modeling come into this?
InVEST is software that allows decision makers to model how a change in coastal management might affect fisheries, coastal protection, and recreation, or how a new fisheries policy might affect recreational fishing and diving
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Have you had a chance to try out the marine version yet?
Yes, we’re partnering with the West Coast Vancouver Island Aquatic Management Board— everybody calls it West Coast Aquatic—which oversees about 285 miles of coastline. There are a whole bunch of groups under this umbrella: the provincial government, the federal Department of Fisheries and Oceans, the First Nations bands, and local business, which is mostly tourism. West Coast Aquatic is going through a marine spatial planning process, a kind of quasi-zoning, to decide where they want shellfish harvest, where they want tourism development, where they want recreation. We’re also working in Belize. Are the issues similar there?
Belize is working on a countrywide coastal zone management plan. Essentially they’re asking the same question as Vancouver Island: How do we apportion human activities and achieve multiple objectives? Tourism is big in Belize. So is hurricane and storm surge protection, which is an ecosystem service the mangroves
left: photograph for onearth by Annie Marie Musselman; right: illustration by Carl Wiens
value added
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revenue in the local economy. Politicians are managers. They’re barraged by competing interests arguing that their particular use of a natural resource is the best and highest value. They don’t have a common way to value all those competing resources. InVEST can estimate a fair value for different ecosystem benefits. We can quantify that in dollars, or we can use another criterion that is meaningful to those involved, like the number of visitors to a particular recreational site.
offer. They’ve also got commercial fisheries for lobster and conch. And there may be a little bit of oil and gas permitting on the horizon. So there are trade-offs. If you cut down the mangroves for development, you’re losing coastal storm protection and a nursery habitat for fisheries. They’re trying to balance tourism development with commercial fisheries and coastal storm protection. And they’re on a fast track; the government wants a plan to present to its ministers later this year.
those very real on-the-ground questions back to the scientists and say, Okay, here’s a challenge from the field. How are we going to solve these problems?
How easily do data from one place transfer to another?
We saw the same thing after the Deepwater Horizon blowout. There was a lot of pushback from the oil and gas community. They argued that if the government shut down further drilling, the community would lose this many jobs. But then you’ve got to ask what happens if there’s another spill. How many shrimpers will be put out of business? How many tourists will stay away from the Gulf Coast beaches and put hospitality industry workers out of a job?
Not very easily. For example, marsh habitat may be worth $6 a hectare [about $2.40 an acre] in a certain area. But that doesn’t help people trying to make local decisions, because the value of a marsh in Florida is very different from the value of that same habitat in Thailand or Belize. We don’t have a central database that offers a universal value of habitat like mangroves. We think that’s misleading. Who are your clients?
NGOs with specific projects and government people at all different levels. Often they’re administrators who have been given a mandate by their legislature to include broader-scale concepts like ecosystem services in their zoning and planning processes. It’s the same sort of zoning they’ve always done, but now they’re told to bring nature’s processes into account. And they don’t know where to turn. How much is that because of controversies over jobs and economic benefits? In disputes over land or water use nowadays, everyone arrives with their own competing claims.
Right, and certain sectors have the numbers at their fingertips, and others don’t. When people don’t have all the data they need, we can act as a go-between. We can move
Fracking seems like a classic example. We had a job fair here in Seattle recently, with energy companies hiring folks to work in North Dakota, where they use fracking to get at the shale oil. The attraction of jobs got a lot of play. But nobody mentioned the potential long-term cost to other jobs like farming and ranching if fracking pollutes the water table.
What other projects do you have coming up?
THE DESERT IN BLOOM A promising new technology has the potential to create indoor oases in our most arid zones
w
hat if you could take the two commodities that we don’t seem to be running out of—sunlight and seawater—and transform them into what we increasingly are short on, namely food and freshwater? That’s the vision behind the London-based company Seawater Greenhouse, whose technology is the basis of the Sahara Forest Project, a 10-acre demonstration center along Jordan’s Red Sea coast that’s expected to produce freshwater, food, energy, and biomass beginning in 2015. Here’s how it works: seawater is pumped by means of solar energy to one of the company’s custom greenhouses, where it trickles over an evaporator, cooling and humidifying the air. This air is then pumped into the growing area to create an interior ideal for crops. When it gets to the other end of the greenhouse, the air is reheated and further humidified once it comes into contact with a second evaporator, which is fed by seawater that has been heated on top of the greenhouse. This hot, saturated air then travels up pipes cooled by yet more incoming seawater; the temperature difference creates freshwater in the form of condensation, which is collected and used to nourish crops. The hotter and drier the climate, the more excess water each greenhouse produces. What’s left over can be used to clean the solar reflectors. “Given the low cost of seawater and the high cost of energy,” says Seawater Greenhouse founder Charlie Paton, “it’s much cheaper to cool a greenhouse [enough to grow crops] somewhere hot and sunny using seawater than it is to heat a greenhouse somewhere —RENEE CHO cool and gray” using traditional fossil fuels.
Right now we’re partnering with a lot of people in the development community in China and Latin America. The idea is to combine our efforts with poverty reduction and to link human well-being to the health of ecosystems. We’re also working more with private companies on getting to a sustainable bottom line. One of the first projects in that area involves Dow Chemical and the Nature Conservancy. Dow wants to take a cradle-to-grave look at the environmental impact of their products—what they call a life-cycle analysis—up and down their supply chains. Because they use a lot of water in their manufacturing processes, they want to figure out how to better sustain the water supply in different regions of the world where they operate. I think we can help them with that.
spring 2012
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F RONTLIN E S
extra points
The football star and activist focuses on educating children.
moving the goalposts
T
Atlanta Falcons fullback Ovie Mughelli has taken the energy-saving ball and run with it By jocelyn c. zuckerman
welve teenagers, giddy with just-out-of-
school energy, are gathered in a low-ceilinged room at the Boys & Girls Club in Lawrenceville, Georgia, where Ovie Mughelli, the All-Pro Atlanta Falcons fullback, has arrived to lead a weekly session on environmental awareness. He urges the kids to find a seat among the secondhand ballroom chairs and then proceeds to introduce George Hobby, the owner of a local energy-audit company, whom Mughelli has invited as the “green speaker” of the day. “I’ve come here to talk about your homes,” Hobby says in a deep southern drawl. “To talk about what you can do, and tell your parents to do, to save energy and help save money on your utility bills.” “Wait!” interjects Mughelli with feigned surprise. “You mean they can start saving on their energy bills tonight? You guys need any extra change in your pockets?” he asks the kids, to rowdy affirmation all around. For the past three years, when he hasn’t been suiting up for practice or rushing for yards on game day, Mughelli has been a tireless advocate for the environment. Back in 2008, he was asked to attend a benefit for
“
the Upper Chattahoochee Riverkeeper in Atlanta to perform his usual job of “shaking hands and kissing babies,” he says. That night he met Laura Turner Seydel, the daughter of CNN mogul Ted Turner and cofounder of the organization dedicated to preserving the Chattahoochee, which provides Atlanta with 70 percent of its freshwater. “Speaker after speaker talked about why we have to do our part,” Mughelli recalls. “They said that we can’t strip the planet of resources, and we have to be concerned about the air our children breathe.” Before that night, Mughelli says, he had “heard but never listened to” arguments about protecting the environment. Immediately after the dinner, he began making up for lost time. “Whenever Laura did any kind of green event or educational event, I’d show up.” To help get the message out, he added an environmental component to the free football camps he runs in Atlanta and his hometown of Charleston, South Carolina. “If you just had a camp on environmental education,” he says, “nobody would show up.” So he came up with activities like Recycle on the Run: an unconventional obstacle course in which participants, while cradling
Mughelli came up with activities like Recycle on the Run, an eco-awareness obstacle course
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OPPOSITE: Brad Mitchell/Finale Photography; illustration by zacH trenholm; top RIGHT: ned deloach; BOTTOM RIGHT: Timothy S. Allen
a football and contending with walls and traffic cones, must navigate a trash-strewn path, picking up paper wrappers, plastic containers, aluminum cans, and bottles and disposing of them in the proper recycling bins. Slow finishers can make up time by answering eco-trivia questions or unscrambling environmental words. “I want them to understand,” Mughelli says, “that recycling has to become second nature to us all.” The after-school clubs he organizes are tailored to low-income urban communities where students may be dealing with poverty, violence, and hunger—and where environmental issues typically “aren’t even on their radar,” Mughelli says. With the help of his wife, Masika Perkins, executive director of the three-year-old Ovie Mughelli Foundation, he leads everyone in games like Environmental Jeopardy and Environmental Family Feud. The opportunity to win green-themed swag and tickets to professional sporting events helps distractible kids pay attention during discussions on topics like air quality, water quality, and green jobs. “It’s a passion for me,” says the 31-year-old Mughelli of his admittedly time-consuming side gig. “I love my daughter,” he adds by way of explanation. He wants his 3-yearold “to be able to say, in 15 years, ‘Dad, I’m so proud of you for giving me a better future.’ ” Back at the Boys & Girls Club, George Hobby hands out worksheets on electricity and encourages the children to have their parents call to arrange a free home audit. “You guys can’t just listen,” Mughelli tells the group. “Ever ything that Mr. Hobby said is great, but if you don’t talk to your parents, do the actions, finish your assignments—it doesn’t mean a thing.” Once the talk is over and the teenagers have filed out, Mughelli grows reflective. “It’s important for kids to understand that they matter,” he says. “That it does make a difference what they do or don’t do. That they hold the power in their hands.”
TO GRILL A PREDATOR
O
Pulling Rank Most of us would love to know exactly which products are rated the most energyefficient, but the act of researching all those refrigerators, cars, TVs, computers, and dishwashers can sometimes feel like a chore. At TopTenUSA. org you’ll find unbiased rankings of the 10 most energy-saving products in a wide range of categories, along with pricing, specifications, and local and online retail options. The quest for efficiency just got more, well, efficient.
ver the last decade, the spiny, brightly colored lionfish— historically found in the Indo-Pacific—has been turning up along the eastern seaboard, in waters as far north as New England. Theories vary as to how the species first landed on this side of the country, but it has since been aided on its journey by the swift waters of the Gulf Stream. Pretty as it looks, though, the lionfish is a fierce predator: its entry into an area can reduce the survival of small reef fish by 80 percent. That’s why the chefs at Kamalame Cay, a luxury eco-resort in the Bahamas, have begun cooking up the invader (it’s said to taste like snapper) for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Lionfish ceviche, anyone? Visit kamalame.com.
ART THAT FLOATS
W
hat’s for dinner? That question served as
the starting point for artists from around the world taking part in the 2012 Cheng Long Wetlands International Environmental Art Project. Each year, participants create environmentally themed, sitespecific installations, made in conjunction with the villagers and schoolchildren of Cheng Long, a community on Taiwan’s southwestern coast. Subjects might include organic aquaculture (this year’s) or the wetlands themselves, which in 2011 inspired the Bulgarian sculptor Rumen Dimitrov to craft Flying Boats (below) out of bamboo, rope, driftwood, and living plants.
says who?
“There are two activities in my personal life that give me limitless amounts of joy. They are, quite simply, driving my electric car and making a trip to the hazardous waste facility.” —will ferrell
spring 2012
onearth 2 3
the synthesist
by alan burdick
smoke signals”—patterns of behavior that augur a pending crisis. Global Pulse was formed in 2009 at the direct request of U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, just as the Greek economic crisis was blooming. The United Nations saw a need to gather data more quickly. “We live in a hyperconnected world,” says Kirkpatrick. “We’re seeing socioeconomic crises moving with the speed of natural disasters.” Meanwhile, real-time data are everywhere. Mobile phones are becoming the primary way to interact and exchange data, especially in developing countries (see “India Calling,” p. 28). African farmers get the latest produce prices from the commodities exchange via text. People use their cell phones to wire money and socialize online. No wonder Indonesia, not Britain, is now the number two Facebook market in the world. All that chatter adds up to “hard, quantitative records, in time and space, of collective human behavior,” Kirkpatrick notes. “They’re looking for work; they’re listing their symptoms on Twitter, what they paid for gas, food, medical care. That’s content that’s relevant to the work of the U.N. And people are generating it for free, all day long.” The challenge lies in gaining access to the data, and making sense of it. Web-search and call-data records are proprietary and often bound by privacy concerns; part of Kirkpatrick’s job is to talk companies into unlocking some of it for the global good. The initiative is also forming partnerships with data-mining companies and academic researchers to develop new ways of recycling digital soot. Global Pulse is very much in beta; its first projects are small, to provide proof of concept. One, conducted with MIT, scoured the Web for daily fluctuations in the price of bread at South American superherever we go, whatever we do, we leave a trail. Landfills, carbon emis- markets to see whether the approach offers a reliable way to monitor inflation. (It does.) Another filtered keywords from tweets and other sions, by-products, fumes. The key to our future lies in reducing this waste and, criti- social media in Ireland and the United States, then compared them cally, recycling it: creating tomorrow’s with official unemployment stats to gauge whether changes in online conversations forecast spikes in unemployment. (They do.) energy from today’s exhaust. Kirkpatrick glows at the prospect of mining data exhaust for inThe same holds true in the cloud. formational gold. “This is a new field that touches on food security, When you click on a Web page, enter a search term, or send a text, you leave digital crumbs—not your women, health, poverty, education,” he says. And the environment, he name or age, necessarily, but data about the time, your where- adds, inasmuch as “the environment is the container of the economy. If environmental pressures are causing people to migrate, pushing abouts, and hints of what you’re after. Alone these bits and bytes animals and people together to cause zoonotic outbreaks, or causing mean little; but in the aggregate, and properly mined, this mass of “passive data” offers valuable insights into human wants and crops to fail and prompting people to make short-term trade-offs, that’s all relevant, that’s all human behavior.” behavior. For those able to filter it—think Amazon visit onearth.org Kirkpatrick has worked in Cambodia, Afghanistan, or Google—data exhaust is big business. for online-only editions of Alan and Iraq. He co-founded and led the Humanitarian Why not harness it to improve the planet? To Burdick’s column about green technology and ideas. onearth.org/synthesist Systems team at Microsoft, which develops software Robert Kirkpatrick, the director of a United Nato make aid work more effective. At first glance, the tions initiative called Global Pulse, data exhaust represents an untapped, unnatural resource. Consider the Flu Trends United Nations doesn’t seem like the logical place to find an innovative tech startup. Yet there it is, grafted onto the world’s largest nongovproject developed by Google.org, the nonprofit arm of the search giant. By monitoring when and where people enter key search terms like ernmental presence, perfectly situated to monitor the planet’s pulse. “It’s a new approach,” Kirkpatrick says. “It’s nice to be in a place flu and fever, Google can accurately detect outbreaks of seasonal flu. Global Pulse would widen the mandate. When droughts, famines, like the U.N. so we can test it out—and, if it works, spread the word.” On Twitter and Facebook, maybe. Definitely via cell phone. and natural disasters occur, people change where they go, whom they call, and the kinds of information they seek and trade. By filtering the data exhaust generated by social media and cell phone networks around Alan Burdick, a contributing editor and regular columnist for OnEarth, is the the world, it should be possible to pick up what Kirkpatrick calls “digital author of Out of Eden (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
Gr8 digital soot!
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illustration by jesse lefkowitz
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Traveling too light?
O
by robert moor
nce a year or so, I visit my
old gear. It’s all lined up in a storage unit in suburban Illinois, like relics
in a fluoro-lit Wunderkammer: a blue internal-
frame backpack, my first love (age 10), kindly donated to me by L.L. Bean to replace the Kelty external-frame I lost when my summer camp burned down; a negative-five-degree sleeping 2 6 onearth
spring 2012
bag that got me through a two-day snowstorm on Aconcagua; a pair of double-plastic Scarpa mountaineering boots I wore up a volcano in Mexico, across a glacier in Alaska, and to the bagel shop one morning in snow-stunned Providence; a wooden canoe paddle; a wobbly headed ice axe; a row of scuffed and sticker-slathered Nalgene bottles that I used to fill with boiling water, throw in the bottom of my sleeping bag, cuddle with through the night, and then, come morning, crack open and drink from, the water now a lukewarm, plastic-infused tea; as well as an array of gimmicks (remember the Kelty Back Balancer? the Garmin Geko?) quickly disfavored but never discarded. The simple fact is that gear is memory, more vivid than any photograph. It would pain me to sell it, give it away, toss it out. So naturally, when I flew down to Georgia to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail one spring, I was shocked to find it strewn with people’s cast-off belongings. Novice thru-hikers tend to start off with heavy loads and shed unnecessary items along the way before buying all-new, lighter gear, usually somewhere around Virginia. In each shelter north of Springer Mountain you can find heaps of spare clothing, canned food, broken gadgets, useless utensils. Someone a few days ahead of me had, for some reason, decided to begin his hike with a crossbow. I slowly deduced this from evidence I found along the trail: 10 crossbow darts discarded in a trailside shelter, followed by 10 more, and then finally, in a lean-to some 50 miles up the trail, one last dart—lying next to the crossbow itself. Having spent endless late nights prowling the esoteric, contentious underworld of long-distance-hiking Web forums, I managed to avoid making this mistake. I had already upgraded all of my old gear to ultralight alternatives: my Dana pack for a decapitated-looking Granite Gear, my tent for a Hennessy Hammock, my boots for trail runners, and my MSR WhisperLite for an alcohol stove made from two aluminum beer cans. My gear was so light, so Mylar-shiny and extraterrestrialseeming, that the other hikers gave me the trail name Spaceman. I became weight-obsessed. As I blasted north, I jettisoned every last unnecessary ounce; at night I even tore out and burned pages I’d read from my books. You may have seen me that summer, standing like a crazed vagrant in the antiseptic light of a Dollar General, lofting a candy bar in each hand, trying to judge which was the lighter. Even though my kit was perfectly light, I often found myself looking covetously at other people’s gear, always with an eye to reducing my load. I still remember one pack in particular—a coral-pink Osprey, which had begun popping up like mushrooms halfway through the summer—that I lusted after with Humbertian passion. Oh, those superlight clips, hollowed out like little avian bones! Oh, that arcing, diaphanous suspension system, hugging airily to the spine! (To paraphrase Nabokov, you can always count on a gear fetishist for a fancy prose style.) Somewhat ironically, the ultralight movement was founded on the virtues of minimalism and thrift. The godfather of ultralighters, Ray Jardine, built his gear from scratch, shaving 17 pounds off his pack weight and saving some $1,500 in the process. But as outdoor goliaths like Marmot and Mountain Hardwear co-opted the craze, ultralight devolved from an ethos to mere advertising jargon—meaning ultraelite and, of course, ultra-expensive. While eco-friendly fabrics like recycled fleece and organic hemp have made inroads into the industry,
illustration by kim rosen
living green
ultralight products generally require “cutting edge” (read: virgin, syn- remembers living in Boulder, Colorado, and seeing people walking thetic) fabrics. Lighter gear has indubitably allowed us to move faster around in cheap, disposable gear, then going to his local thrift store and farther. But it has also created items that are ever more fragile and seeing 25-year-old garments “that were probably better suited to and quickly outmoded: the iPodification of the outdoors. Colorado winters than the new stuff coming out now. It looked authentic, Now, every six months or so, I have to replace my beer-can stove; and it was made in Boulder, just a few blocks away, rather than China.” every three years, my ultralight rain shell. On a recent off-trail hike Authentic is a word Thrope uses a lot. It implies that our experience of through the gnarled tuckamore groves of Newfoundland, I managed the outdoors has become impoverished by technological advances—that to shred my pack’s elastic waterthere’s something unnatural about bottle pockets and break its plastic sleeping in ethereal domes of nylon frame sheet clean in half. Granite and rehydrating our dinners atop Lighter gear has allowed us to Gear has a great customer service flaming canisters of pressurized gas. move faster and farther. But it has also department, and someone there (I, Spaceman, can relate.) created items that are ever more fragile promised to send me a comparable In the search for authenticity, model, but what arrived in the mail a crop of “heritage brands” has and quickly outmoded. was a newer, flimsier, more comemerged in the past five years, ofplicated version of the last. When I fering canvas backpacks adorned asked the nice lady on the phone what would happen to my old pack, with swatches of leather, heavy flannels, and clunky leather boots. she sighed, “Oh, we’ll probably junk it.” Thrope, who prefers to buy his gear secondhand, has mixed feelings Guilt-stricken, I asked her to mail it back to me. about it all. “Half of it’s wonderful and authentic and made to last,” he said. “And then there’s some real crap out there that’s called ‘heritage.’ Searching for a way to curb the mounting pile It’s bad stuff, a marketing ploy.” The heritage wave is supposed to be about a return to the triedof junk inside my storage unit, I called up Jeff Thrope, a writer who has emerged as an authority on the cultural shift he calls “outdoor and-true. And it should be noted: going retro doesn’t have to mean nostalgia”—the deliberate turning-back to the outdoor culture of the returning to the days of the 75-pound pack. In 1948, the first man last century. “For an industry that’s based around getting people outside, to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail, Earl Shaffer, kept his pack weight [outdoor gear] is still consumer-driven, so I think a lot of innovation to just 20 pounds by trading his tent and sleeping bag for a poncho, a in clothing technology is just pure marketing,” Thrope told me. He burlap sack, and a blanket; on his feet he wore moccasin-style boots with no socks. The first woman to thru-hike the trail, Emma “Grandma” Gatewood, carried even less, hiking in a pair of Keds with a duffel bag S HOR T T A K E slung over her shoulder and a shower curtain to keep herself dry. The bargain these hikers struck was to carry heavy, rugged gear, but less of it. Ultralight technology has allowed us to carry more but has forced us to replace it more often. Neither way is particularly Given that their customers are generally eco-friendly. Classic gear tended to be made from leather, monoculture cotton, or, later, Cordura (first developed by the mega-polluting self-selected for conservationist streaks, several manuDuPont, now owned by the anti-environmentalist Koch brothers). facturers of outdoor gear have started programs aimed Much of that gear, too, was fantastically uncomfortable. at reducing the presence of their spent products in the Even Thrope, the consummate nostalgist, admits vintage gear can be nation’s landfills. GoLite’s Product Take-Back Program impractical for longer hikes. Over the years he’s collected more than 20 vintage backpacks, but the one he uses the most these days is a spaceinvites consumers to return any used GoLite items so agey frameless roll-top rucksack made by Hyperlite Mountain Gear. It’s that they can be reused or recycled. Chaco, maker of made out of Cuben Fiber, a fabric originally used for racing sails, which footwear beloved by hikers, has its popular “ReChaco” is stronger than Kevlar, lighter than nylon, and completely waterproof. option, whereby customers can send in their sandals to Most impressive of all: the whole pack weighs only 1.5 pounds. As he’s describing it, I can feel the old lust stirring. (Hyperlite of my be re-soled and re-strapped. And Jetboil, which makes life, fire of my loins!) But before I make another impulsive purchase, cooking equipment for campers, now sells a product I’ll be sure to call Hyperlite’s customer service department and ask called the Crunchit, which punctures and crushes busome questions about its durability. Because the next time I fall in tane fuel canisters in such a way as to render them love with a backpack, I intend to be in it for the long haul.
[
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Happier Trails
ready for the recycling bin. For more information, visit golite.com, chacos.com, jetboil.com.
Robert Moor, a New York-based freelance writer, is currently a Middlebury Fellow in Environmental Journalism.
spring 2012
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india calling by george black
how the cell phone revolution can raise millions out of poverty, promote clean energy, and help fix the climate
s
quatting in a dusty field in the village of Rataul, two hours north of Delhi in the state of Uttar Pradesh, a young woman, like uncounted generations of women before her, is shaping a small mountain of cow dung into Frisbee-size cakes that will fire the family’s cookstove. Perhaps she will make a couple of phone calls before preparing dinner, using her new mobile. She’ll get a five-bar signal: barely a hundred yards away, across a patch of waste ground where some water buffalo are nosing around in the dirt, is a tall, slender cell phone tower. The photovoltaic panels that power it glitter in the latemorning sunlight. That strip of waste ground is a bridge between past and future, and hundreds of millions of Indians may now be poised to cross it. Ask any Indian to name the quintessential symbol of the bad old days, the era of rigid state control of the
photographs by agnès dherbeys spring 2012
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hand to mouth Working 10-hour days in the hot sun, women in Uttar Pradesh thresh rice as they have for centuries.
economy and stultifying bureaucracy, and the answer will often be simple: getting a telephone. You could wait many years for a landline, the only way of speeding things up being whom you knew—and how many rupees you were prepared to slip them under the table. Ask for a symbol of the new India, the thing that most dramatically improves a person’s life prospects, and the answer will be equally straightforward: the cell phone. No further need for insider contacts or bribes; all that counts is the basic law of supply and demand. India has 1.2 billion people and almost 900 million mobile subscribers,
the juice flows through them for only a few hours each day. Maybe this spurt of power will come in the morning, maybe in the middle of the night. Maybe they’ll tell you those hours in advance, and maybe they won’t. And that’s a huge headache for the cell phone providers as well as for the villagers. India’s urban market is now saturated, with more phones than people, but only about 35 percent of the rural population have gone mobile. The remaining 65 percent are the next market frontier, but if the industry is to reach these people it needs to keep build-
only about 35 percent of the rural population have gone mobile. the remaining 65 percent are the next market frontier. a figure that has more than doubled in the past three years. This growth spurt has gone hand in hand with the country’s economic boom. Which is cause and which is effect is hard to say, but Indian telecom executives like to cite a study by the consulting firm Deloitte, showing that a 10 percentage-point increase in “mobile penetration” corresponds to a 1.2 percent increase in the rate of growth of the gross domestic product. There’s a hitch, however. The fruits of the boom have not been equitably shared; about a third of the population, most living in villages like Rataul, still have few paths to the economic mainstream because they lack reliable access to electricity. Energy is India’s biggest problem. True, there are utility poles here, and sagging wires, but 3 0 onearth
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ing towers. Today there are about 350,000 of these towers, where “base transceiver stations” convert electricity into radio waves. Ten percent of them are completely off the grid; 30 percent are in places like Rataul, which have power for less than 12 hours a day. To tap the rural market, the mobile companies plan to add at least 200,000 towers in the next three to five years, and almost all of them will be in areas without a reliable—or any—power supply. So where will the electricity come from? For now, the answer is diesel generators, which are both dirty and expensive. But in the future, the logic (strongly endorsed by the Indian government) lies with solar power and other renewables.
illustration by bruce morser
Before driving out to Rataul, I’d gone to see Rajiv Bawa, the energetic chief representative officer for the Telenor group in India, at his office in Gurgaon, the smog-choked boomtown on the outskirts of Delhi where many of the country’s telecom companies have their headquarters. Telenor, based in Norway, is one of the world’s largest mobile providers, although Uninor, a joint venture in which it holds a majority share, entered the crowded Indian cell phone market only two years ago. “We already have 35 million subscribers,” Bawa told me, “but that’s still quite small. In India, everything has to have at least seven zeros.” Uninor’s target audience, he said, is “the common man”—and even more than that, given the gender gap in mobile ownership here, the common woman. There will be no bells and whistles, no endorsements from Bollywood stars, no data plans or smart phone apps, just basic voice and text services. “We want to be the Southwest Airlines of the mobile industry,” he said. Bawa, a native of Delhi, worked in the United States for 16 years, much of that time for IBM, before returning home. “In an emerging economy like India’s, environmental issues arise immediately; it’s the nature of the beast,” he said. The most urgent of these, he added, was the industry’s dependence on diesel. “As a Scandinavian company,” he went on, “we have particular standards about how we do business, in terms of the environment, emissions, and CO2 targets.” Yet even without this corporate ethic, in a brutally competitive marketplace where profit margins are razor-thin, there are potent economic arguments for phasing out diesel. The telecom sector is the second-largest consumer of diesel in India, Bawa told me; only the railways use more. “It’s an unbelievable amount on our balance sheets,” he said—energy accounts for up to a third of the industry’s operating costs. The price of diesel has almost tripled since 2000, although the true cost is still masked by government subsidies. But those won’t last forever. In the meantime, the price of photovoltaics, like the array of 21 panels on the Rataul tower, has come down by half in the past three years and continues to fall. The initial capital expense is higher, but after that solar is an almost free ride: the technology is proven, maintenance is minimal, there’s no fuel to truck in, and, best of all, for most of the year India bakes under a tropical sun. Even here, of course, the sun doesn’t shine around the clock. As I strolled around the Rataul tower site with a bevy of Bawa’s technical experts, they explained that it’s actually a solar-diesel hybrid. But instead of running 16 hours a day or more, the generator kicks in for only a brief spell at night. Uninor is experimenting with a whole menu of other techniques and technologies to reduce energy use. The main draw on power is air-conditioning the enclosed shelters that house the generator and other equipment; the company’s alternative is “free cooling,” pulling in the naturally colder air from outside (cold being a relative term in India), while also using heat exchangers to draw up even colder air from belowground. Add fuel catalysts that make the diesel-combustion process more efficient and smart technologies that automatically shut off the power when there’s no phone traffic, and you can slash energy use by up to 30 percent, one of the engineers said. Radical cost-cutting, a smaller carbon footprint, and an entry point into the coveted rural market: where these three motives converge, the mobile revolution may also be the catalyst for a revolution in clean energy and social equity.
nrdc the power of technology
anjali Jaiswal senior attorney in NRDC’s San Francisco office, spearheading the organization’s India initiative
What are the main challenges right now for NRDC in India? The scope of change in India is enormous. The economic boom and the intensifying demand for energy are worsening pollution levels and other environmental stresses. To meet these challenges, we’re working with our Indian partners on many fronts. For example, in the fast-growing city of Ahmedabad, our public health work aims to protect residents from the extreme effects of climate change, particularly by strengthening their ability to cope with increasingly deadly heat waves. In the realm of energy, we’re focused on speeding up efficient building construction, bolstering the government’s solar initiative, and increasing U.S.–India cooperation on clean energy and climate change. Like most of the developing world, India is urbanizing rapidly. What role can its cities play in addressing climate change? Cities are the front lines where people deal with the worst environmental problems, from air pollution and rising energy demand to extreme weather brought on by climate change. We’ve seen how effective it can be to work directly with local community leaders to tackle these issues head-on. In Hyderabad, for example, we have partnered with city officials to adopt an efficient building code and accelerated smartbuilding design through a network of leading real estate developers. These local projects can provide a road map for other cities to adopt. We’re also exploring ways to reduce dirty diesel pollution by strengthening emissions standards and public awareness as the Indian market for diesel cars explodes. This story describes the environmental potential of cell phones and other new technologies. Have you seen examples of that? The cell phone market has transformed how India works and shows the dynamic role technology can play in building a sustainable energy future. Our work in Ahmedabad offers one exciting example. We and our local partners are working with city officials to develop an emergency SMS text system to warn residents of heat waves and provide practical advice that will help prevent fatalities from extreme heat. Off-grid solar lighting systems are another innovative technology, promising to provide clean, affordable energy to a rural population that currently lacks access to conventional power. We will keep looking for opportunities like these to use technology to protect human health and the environment.
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rooftop energy A solar-powered microgrid in the village of Ashrafpur provides electricity for 10 households.
In the cow belt
New Delhi
NEPAL
eight young people from the surUTTAR A PRADESH rounding district had been killed Once the towers have leapfrogged L INDIA A after eloping. Three were girls over the power outages and people Y A S •Lank beheaded by male relatives. hold a phone in their hands—usu•Bangalore •Rataul Uninor responded to these events ally just an entry-level Nokia or by creating Mera Mobile, Mera Samsung, with airtime at about one New Delhi Saathi (My Mobile, My Compancent a minute, the lowest rate in the G an ge ion), a program that sent voice mesworld—the possibilities are limits Uttar sages to rural subscribers on health, less. To see a few of them, I spent pradesH •Agra education, and personal safety. To a week in the north Indian state of Lucknow Ya • avoid a hostile reaction from conserUttar Pradesh. •Khairatpur/ •Gorakhpur mu • Ashrafpur Arazibanshi n vatives, the wording was carefully U.P., as it is commonly known, Jaiswal bihar uncontentious: Rekha’s child is sick; is the heart of what is variously she used her phone to get him medicalled the Cow Belt or the Hindi • •Kanethi Allahabad cal attention. The phone is Rekha’s Belt—although almost one in five friend; is it yours? inhabitants is a Muslim and several Farther east, in the villages of U.P.’s celebrated cities, like Agra, around Gorakhpur, a typically Allahabad, and the state capital, chaotic, ramshackle city of Lucknow, are former strongholds 700,000 close to the border of of the Mughal Empire, which swept 0 100 miles U.P. and the equally impoverthrough the Hindu lands from Cenished state of Bihar, Uninor has tral Asia in the 1500s and controlled embarked on the pilot phase of most of the subcontinent for the next two centuries. More technically, U.P. is the heart of the Indo- Aditi Urja Vikas (roughly translatable as Boundless Energy and Gangetic Plain, the vast, fertile floodplain of the Ganges, the Yamuna, Development). Here the environmental dimension is more explicit, a slow, patient build-out in which one effort to bring the rural poor and other rivers both great and sacred. Much of the state is a monotonous, unbroken carpet of wheat into the economic mainstream nourishes another. In this case, fields and rice paddies. But the fertility is deceptive. With 200 million mobile phones meet solar lighting. The Achilles’ heel of the cell phone is the need to keep it charged, people—almost as many as Brazil, but compacted into 3 percent of H
IM
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map by steve stankiewicz
the target audience is “the common man”—and more than that, given the gender gap in mobile ownership, the common woman the land area—Uttar Pradesh encompasses the full range of India’s problems. Other Indians call it backward—a word they use without apology or embarrassment. Most of the population struggles to get by on less than two dollars a day. Official corruption is off the charts. The gender gap is a yawning gulf. As a result, U.P. has become a laboratory for all manner of social experiments—government projects, NGO pilot studies, renewable energy schemes, and private-sector initiatives from the likes of Uninor. If you can fix a problem here, the thinking goes, you can fix it anywhere. The gender gap in cell phone use is much larger in South Asia than in any other region of the world, and U.P.’s deep cultural conservatism is manifest in a sometimes ferocious backlash against women who want to go mobile. In November 2010, in the village of Lank, an hour or so north of Rataul, the local elected council, the panchayat, issued an edict banning the use of phones by unmarried girls; boys would be allowed to make calls, but only under adult supervision. The village elders feared flirtation, romance, violation of the strictures of home, family, and arranged marriage—offenses that can carry the gravest of sanctions. Honor killings are often thought of as a mark of conservative Islam, but they are common in Hindu villages too. In the month leading up to the episode in Lank, local police said,
not an easy thing if you live in a village like Arazibanshi Jaiswal. You can hook it up to the battery of your tractor (assuming you’re one of the handful of villagers prosperous enough to own one). You can hope that the need for a charge coincides with the odd hours when the grid is cooperating. Or you can catch an autorickshaw into Gorakhpur, 10 miles away, and pay a shopkeeper 10 or 15 rupees for the privilege—20 or 30 cents, no small amount for an Uttar Pradeshi. Now you can also visit Vidyawati Chaudhary. I found Chaudhary on the front porch of her home in Arazibanshi Jaiswal, a shy but goodnatured 24-year-old, dressed in a black sari with silver horizontal stripes and Rajasthani-style mirrored embroidery. In a storeroom behind her, tucked in among barrels of cooking oil, pots and pans, and sacks of animal feed, was a shelf of bright yellow solar lanterns. In the living room, next to a collection of lurid portraits and statues of the Hindu deity Shiva and his wife, Parvati, and the elephant-headed god Ganesh, was a large battery that drew its power from a bank of photovoltaic panels on the roof. What was more natural than to use that same power to recharge both lanterns and cell phones? This simple logic led Uninor into a partnership with the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), a think tank-cum-scientific research center in New Delhi that specializes in off-the-grid renewable energy technologies and is headed by spring 2012
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NO FIRE WITHOUT SMOKE Using her traditional mud cookstove, Sudha Devi prepares dinner for her husband and their three children.
Rajendra Pachauri, who happens also to be the chairman of the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Arazibanshi Jaiswal is one of 150 villages in U.P. and Bihar where TERI’s Lighting a Billion Lives program (see “India, Enlightened,” OnEarth, Summer 2009) and Uninor’s Aditi Urja Vikas project intend to collaborate. Everything will be run by local women. Chaudhary told me that her charging station and lantern business had been up and running for three months. Business was the key word here, both for her and for Uninor, and Chaudhary herself was the entrepreneur—a word that is a kind of magical incantation in India today. She had rented out 32 lanterns the previous evening, she said, at two rupees apiece. A good night. Phone charging costs five rupees, and for a tiny commission she’ll also add more minutes to a Uninor subscriber’s account electronically. If she gets someone to sign up for the company’s service and fills out their paperwork, that brings another small commission of eight rupees. It takes about two hours a day to run the business, seven days a week, and it brings in about 500 rupees a week—$10, enough for a few small luxuries. Such as? I asked. Jewelry and clothes, she answered, but also schoolbooks. She was the first girl in her family to go to school, and now she was studying English literature at the local college in Gorakhpur. You had to know English to get ahead in India these days, she said. Her ambition was to join the U.P. police force. I asked what kind of literature she liked best. She covered her eyes with a hand and giggled. “Love stories,” she said. Then she straightened up, looking abashed. “It isn’t a lot of money,” she said, “but it seems to be changing the way people think. Our neighbors have two daughters. One of them was at school with me, but they took her out after grade eight. The younger girl is in sixth now, but they’ve decided to let her stay on. Because they’ve seen what I’m doing.” 3 4 onearth
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Upload image At first, leaving a city like Gorakhpur, you may take the brown haze that hangs over the land as the drifting residue of urban smog. But then you realize that it goes on and on, blanketing the rural hinterlands too. Flying over the Himalayas, which border Uttar Pradesh to the north, you can see it edging over the mountains like an approaching storm front. Some years ago, Veerabhadran (V.) Ramanathan, a renowned Indian-born climate scientist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, dubbed this the Asian Brown Cloud. Over time, the name evolved to Atmospheric Brown Clouds, because the phenomenon is not limited to Asia. In either case, ABC. Peaking in the dry winter months from November to March, much of the haze over U.P. is created by smoke from the dung and firewood that people burn in their primitive mud cookstoves. The main constituent is particulate matter like black carbon, with smaller amounts of carbon monoxide and the so-called precursor gases that react with solar radiation to create ozone. Black carbon is not a greenhouse gas as such—it’s made up of airborne particles of soot that absorb sunlight and heat the air—but as a “climate forcer,” its impact on atmospheric warming is much the same. As it spreads northward, the soot darkens the snow and ice of the Himalayas, warming them in the process. It’s responsible, in fact, for as much as half of the loss of the glaciers that feed the Ganges and the other great rivers of the plain. And there’s another perverse effect: by dimming sunlight, the brown haze lowers ground temperatures. So less warm air rises, which means fewer clouds and reduced rainfall, on which U.P.’s wheat and rice harvests depend. Ozone, a ground-level pollutant, adds to the misery, causing billions of dollars a year in crop losses. Four years ago, having established himself as an authority on black carbon, Ramanathan approached Rajendra Pachauri at TERI to see if
citizen scienTIST Despite leaving school after eighth grade, Shabnam is gathering vital data on climate change.
they might work together. Pachauri told him about the high-efficiency cookstoves that the organization was developing to cut black carbon emissions and introduced him to Ibrahim Hafeez Rehman, the director of TERI’s division of social transformation (see “The Brown Cloud,” p. 37). Ramanathan was obviously a world-class climate scientist, Rehman told me, “but what really appealed to me was his sincerity and genuineness about making a difference at the grassroots level.” But what did all this have to do with mobile phones? To answer that question, I had to travel deeper into U.P., to a cluster of villages
in Hindi. The concept is sweepingly simple: mesh the world-class science and the grassroots reality together, and use the results to do an end run around the fraught, interminable attempts to negotiate a binding global treaty on carbon emissions. Instead of concentrating on carbon dioxide, Ramanathan proposed to focus on black carbon, which accounts for 18 percent of the emissions that are warming the planet; only CO2 contributes more. To gain traction on global warming, and in the process buy time to bear down on the central problem of CO2, attacking black carbon offers
the black carbon project uses advanced technologies like nasa’s a-train satellites. but its pivotal point is the cell phone. just off the road to Lucknow. In Gorakhpur, women were making modest, incremental change. Here, potentially, they were changing the world, one meal and one mobile at a time. At first blush, Ashrafpur and Khairatpur seemed much like any other villages. One-story houses of mud and brick, small temples and mosques, cows and water buffalo slumbering in dirt yards, women in bright saris threshing rice by hand, four hours of electricity a day. The poverty is so desperate that many of the breadwinners head for the Middle East each year for a few months as migrant laborers. In Ashrafpur, a man ran up to me in the street, pounding at his chest and saying, “Gulf! Gulf!” Seeing my puzzlement, he produced the card of a dry-cleaning business in Abu Dhabi, which he’d had sealed in plastic. “Job!” he said. In all likelihood he would return to the village in May or June to help with the pre-monsoon harvest. Nearby Khairatpur is the launch site of Project Surya—“sunlight”
some distinct advantages. While CO2 remains in the atmosphere for about 100 years, black carbon dissipates within days. A similar logic applies to ozone, which has a lifespan of only a month or so. So removing these pollutants at the source brings rapid results. Furthermore, the problem can be addressed locally. Since there’s no need for an international treaty, black carbon is not a political third rail. In fact, Senator James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the most militant of all climate deniers, was one of the cosponsors of a bipartisan bill in 2009 that directed the Environmental Protection Agency to study the impact of black carbon emissions on public health. The science on black carbon is so new (the subject was barely mentioned in the IPCC’s last periodic assessment report, in 2007) that the world is just beginning to grasp its significance. In December, the chief scientist of the U.N. Environment Programme declared that it would be the centerpiece of that agency’s “fast-action agenda” for a low-carbon world. spring 2012
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Project Surya, which began in late 2009, is now collecting real-time hard data on black carbon. Villages using traditional mud stoves represent a control group; meanwhile, starting in Khairatpur, the plan is for TERI’s clean-burning stoves to create a “black carbon hole” in an experimental area that will eventually embrace about 40 villages. The data that are gathered should document both the scale of the problem and the potential magnitude of the remedy. Project Surya relies on the most advanced technologies, from surface sensors to NASA’s A-Train satellites, the most sophisticated tools available to scientists seeking to understand climate change. But its pivotal point is the cell phone, and that can be used by someone with no scientific training. Someone like Shabnam. Khairatpur is a mainly Muslim village of 2,500 people, and Shabnam’s home was not its poorest. The floors were mud, but the walls were of roughly mortared brick, and over the lintel of the living room there were decorative carvings of minarets and onion-domed Mughal tombs. Shabnam was excruciatingly shy at first, avoiding eye contact and speaking in a near-
next to a calibrated color chart. You don’t need a smart phone; the simplest kind will do, just as long as it has a camera. After that she uploads the image and sends it to a remote server. The server instantaneously sends back a text message with a real-time reading of the black carbon level, based on the degree of discoloration of the filter. (The color chart allows the server to standardize the results to account for the proprietary algorithms that each phone manufacturer uses in its digital imaging devices.) Shabnam’s readings are then combined with data from surface sensors and satellites and input into regional climate models. But her mobile is the critical element, because it operbusiness sense ates in real time. Daylong Ragini Pandey manages a monitoring shows that charging station black carbon emissions for villagers’ spike when meals are solar lanterns. being prepared, between 5:00 and 8:00 in the morning and 5:00 and 8:00 in the evening. Readings from a satellite that happens to pass overhead at noon or in the middle of the night will be misleading. But how can you be sure that cookstoves are to blame? I asked Kar. Couldn’t these black carbon peaks be coming from the tailpipes of nearby traffic?
one effort to bring the poor into the mainstream nourishes another. in gorakhpur, cell phones meet solar lighting. whisper. I asked how old she was, and she said 16. Then she thought about it and said, “No, 17.” Her parents pulled her out of school after grade eight, needing her contribution to the family income. To keep up with her book learning, they told her to study the Koran. “She has been an amazingly good learner,” said Abhishek Kar, who oversees TERI’s work here. “She has the confidence to test state-ofthe-art high-tech equipment without any formal training. Lots of people here wouldn’t even dare to touch it.” It was V. Ramanathan’s own daughter, Nithya, who made the conceptual breakthrough. She is the founder of Nexleaf Analytics, a not-for-profit whose mission is to bring mobile phone technology to disadvantaged communities. One day her father asked, half-teasingly, what she could contribute to Project Surya. The cell phone, she said. Shabnam showed me how she uses it. She starts with an unassuming little box, about six inches square, which sits in the kitchen. A miniature, battery-operated pump draws in air, which then passes through a flat quartz filter a bit larger than a quarter. Shabnam removes the filter periodically, puts it in a plastic container, and writes the place, date, and time on the outside. Then she photographs it 3 6 onearth
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He shook his head. They’d thought of that. This location had been chosen because it was at least two kilometers from the state highway and five from the national highway to Lucknow, with its flotillas of smoke-belching diesel trucks. But what nailed it, he said, was a happy accident: the fact that Khairatpur is predominantly Muslim. “We took samples during the month of Ramadan,” he said, when people begin firing up their stoves at 3:00 a.m. for the pre-dawn suhoor. “That’s when the black carbon began to peak, and the results stayed the same for the whole period. So that settled the question once and for all. A Hindu village could never have given us the proof. You need a lot of luck in science, for sure!” He grinned. We went up the staircase to the roof, where there was an array of four photovoltaic panels. There was also an aethalometer, which measures ambient black carbon concentration; a pyranometer, which measures solar irradiation; and an anemometer to track wind speed, which may affect the dispersal of airborne soot. Inside a small brick shed, Shabnam showed me a row of test tubes, in which she collects samples that will allow scientists to refine further the data on pollutant levels, differentiating between black carbon from cookstoves and the
small amount that comes from the motorbikes and the few larger vehicles that make it into Khairatpur’s rutted alleyways. Kar was still beaming. “This is one of the few villages in the world that has a real, functioning weather station,” he said. And the whole operation was run by a girl of 16. Or 17. How far can you go with this? I asked him. He shrugged. “It’s impossible to predict a timetable, because this is such a radical, unprecedented idea,” he said. “But theoretically? South Asia, Africa… you could scale it up to 130 million households.”
Off the grid
Flying into India’s high-tech capital, Bangalore, from the teeming villages of Uttar Pradesh is an extreme form of culture shock. My cabdriver whisked me into the city along a divided highway (soon to be an expressway) flanked by tall concrete pillars (soon to be the metro to the airport). There was hardly a rickshaw or a sari in sight. Instead there were giant billboards advertising financial services, skiing vacations in Switzerland, and luxury prestige residences with golf course views. Yet Bangalore brought me full circle from the dung cakes and the solar cell tower in Rataul. I found a vision here of how the mobile boom could ultimately solve India’s most intractable problem— bringing round-the-clock energy (and clean energy, at that) to the millions who might never be reached by the power grid. Not those who have four hours of electricity a day, or six, or eight. Those who have none. To be fair, India has made a Herculean effort to extend its grid, and that includes a commitment to add 20,000 megawatts of solar power in the next decade, the equivalent of about 30 new coalfired power plants. But the expansion of the grid has not kept pace with the growth in demand, and the gap may just be too big to close. The alternative, says Ashok Das, the director of a small company called DESI Power, is to think from the bottom up, not from the top down. Four years ago, Das told me, he left the world of semiconductors and information technology to devote himself full-time to clean energy. Although he now lives in Bangalore, he is set on returning to his native Bihar, the state that borders U.P. and shares all of its chronic problems. It’s in Bihar that he hopes to deal with India’s perpetual catch-22. If the poor have no disposable income to buy electricity, no one in the private sector will invest in bringing it to them; but if they have no access to energy—to run their grain mills, bakeries, workshops, irrigation pumps, sewing machines, whatever—they will never have any money. In the backcountry of Bihar, DESI Power has been building power plants for more than a decade. These don’t run on anything as exotic as solar thermal arrays, but on humble biomass, heated in a gasifier. And the power plants are tiny, each producing less than 100 kilowatts. But that’s enough to meet all the needs of a small, off-the-grid village. To my surprise, I found Das somewhat skeptical about solar programs like TERI’s Lighting a Billion Lives. “I purposely stayed away from the lantern business,” he said. “It has its own niche, but private companies can’t make a go of it.” He acknowledged that lanterns are useful in places that have some limited connectivity to the grid, providing light for a few hours in the evening. “But this isn’t just about lighting,” he said. “It’s about building an economy. Power for empowerment, that’s my motto.” For the target communities in Bihar, he said, biomass is the best option: it requires the smallest up-front investment; the raw material is often right there in the village, or at least can be planted nearby; and electricity can be generated
THE BROWN CLOUD
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hakuntala Devi was fixing dinner in the village of Ashrafpur. She said she was 50, Indians of an older generation tending to estimate their ages in multiples of 10. She was using two stoves, one the traditional hump of molded mud and the other—furnished by the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI)— an improved model made of stainless steel, with a ceramic interior. “The problem with cookstoves is that they’re not sexy,” said TERI’s Ibrahim Hafeez Rehman, who grew up in Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh, watching people cook with biomass and sicken from the smoke. “But lighting and cooking are people’s two main requirements. To complete the household story, you need to integrate both.” Fix the lighting alone, whether with a lantern or a microgrid (which can power either CFL or LED bulbs), and you’re still left with a major public health hazard. Almost half a million Indians die each year from indoor air pollution; most are women and children. Not that clean-burning cookstoves are an easy sell, Rehman acknowledged. Devi paid 550 rupees for her new stove three years ago—about $11. But that cost was heavily subsidized by TERI. Today such a stove might cost six or seven times as much, and subsidies can’t continue forever. More subtle, yet more tenacious, are the cultural barriers. Cooking is an idiosyncratic activity, its character deeply rooted in local traditions and tastes. “When you provide cleaner energy sources, you have to stay close to the existing culture,” Rehman said. “You still have to use the same fuels, wood and dung. You have to cater to people’s food habits and requirements.” Most important, the food has to taste as good or better. After all, pizza from a microwave isn’t the same as pizza from the oven, and we grill meat over charcoal or mesquite for a reason. Devi said that her new stove doesn’t blacken her wheat-flour rotis as the old one did, and there’s nothing the menfolk like more than a slightly charred roti. On the other hand, people in Uttar Pradesh don’t want their rotis to taste the same as the rotis in West Bengal. TERI experiments constantly with new stove designs. There are top-loaders and front-loaders, some that use fans to improve combustion and others that feed in oxygen through natural convection. There are even pure solar stoves with silvery panels that fan out like an Elizabethan ruff and look as if they’d be at home mounted on the International Space Station. Each has its admirers, and each its detractors, Rehman said. No one size fits all. — G.B.
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THE GREEN SIM CARD
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wo dozen farmers had gathered in the village hall in Kanethi, 20 miles from the banks of the Ganges, to talk about cell phones. Two-thirds of them were subscribers to a service called IKSL, whose majority stakeholders are the Indian Farmers Fertilizer Cooperative (IFFCO) and the country’s biggest mobile phone provider, Bharti Airtel. India’s last green revolution, which began in the 1960s, was based on the intensive use of fertilizers and high-yield seeds. The next one, if it is to happen, will be based on information. Currently, farmers base their decisions on traditional knowledge, past experience, and guesswork—none of which will help much in an era of declining agricultural productivity, atmospheric brown clouds, ozone, longer and hotter summers, unpredictable monsoons, and the steady loss of water from the Himalayan glaciers. IKSL’s “Green SIM Cards” allow farmers to receive five free daily voicemails (preferable to text messages because of widespread illiteracy). The first one, timed to coincide with the start of the workday at 7:00 a.m., gives current market prices for crops in the local procurement centers, so farmers can shop around for the best deal. The second is the daily weather forecast. After that, a miscellany of other messages: how to store your rice after harvest so it isn’t attacked by pests; how to tell the breed of a cow by the shape of its horns. For one cent a minute, farmers can call a help line for expert advice. In the future, they will be able to send in cell phone pictures to identify a particular crop disease or pest. Farmers here grow mainly wheat, a little rice, a little fruit. One by one, they came up to the front of the room and stood, straightbacked as marines, to describe how they used the service. A man’s mango trees had withered; the help line recommended a specific pesticide and gave him advice on the health hazards (wear gloves; stir it with a stick, not by hand). A cow failed to get pregnant after artificial insemination; feed it half a kilo of paan,
the areca nut stimulant that most people here chew, and lay her down with her backside higher than her head. A 10-year-old ran to the fields to pass on a warning to his father that useless knock-off fertilizers were being sold in the local market. You have to keep refining the messages, said Nitish Kumar, IKSL’s sales manager for Uttar Pradesh. It’s no good telling people about the weather in Allahabad if they live in Lucknow, 100 miles away. You have to think local, not generic. “I have this idea,” he said. “Press one for mangos, two for grapes, three for guavas.” — G.B.
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around the clock—once there are guaranteed buyers. That, of course, is the tough part, and the key to finding those buyers and locking in Das’s vision of the future came from David Jhirad, a physicist working for the Rockefeller Foundation (he is now a professor at Johns Hopkins University). The mobile phone industry, Jhirad suggested, with its competitive hunger for rural tower sites that would not use diesel, was the natural candidate. Tower companies would provide the basic demand, guaranteeing the essential “anchor load,” and sign long-term power purchase agreements with local clean-energy providers such as DESI Power. The GSM Association, which represents the interests of mobile operators worldwide and was already committed to the greening of the towers, is actively promoting this paradigm shift, which it calls Community Power from Mobile. Community power can reach 120 million people around the world, the association predicts, with the largest number of potential tower sites, about 70,000, being in India. The Indian cell phone industry likes the idea, I found in my conversations with telecom executives in Gurgaon. “All the tower companies are collaborating on this,” said Sairam Prasad, the chief technology officer for Bharti Infravisit onearth.org tel, an industry giant. “We want to to see more photos from India and hear an interview with the author. increase rural penetration. That’s onearth.org/12spr/india our business. We’re not experts on power generation. We depend on others for that”—meaning local service companies like DESI Power. He’s emphatic that “the government should be giving all its subsidies and financial assistance to the RESCOs [renewable energy service companies] and not to us.” Other influential players are also lining up behind the idea. Community Power from Mobile is backed by the World Bank. DESI Power is working closely with Rockefeller and the Confederation of Indian Industry. The small company has already connected two of its power plants to cell phone towers, one of them owned by Bharti Infratel. But as Rajiv Bawa said, everything in India has to have seven zeros. There need to be scores of companies like DESI Power, which is still a lonely pioneer in the field. The government subsidies have to flow. Villagers will need a lot of technical training. An entrenched “diesel mafia” in places like U.P. and Bihar will do whatever it can to subvert plans for alternative energy sources. TERI will have to overcome the deep cultural skepticism about its clean-burning stoves. And once the subsidies are removed, banks will have to be persuaded to make loans to people with no disposable income and no collateral. An obvious way to offset the costs of those who reduce fossil fuel emissions, be they cookstove users or local energy companies, would be to secure carbon credits, but that’s a cumbersome process that works best with larger-scale operations. Like so many things in India, the challenge of bringing hundreds of millions of people across the bridge from dung cakes to clean energy and greater prosperity can feel overwhelming, perhaps even impossible. But the convergence of market imperatives, the falling cost of renewables, and the fierce demand for social equity makes the transformation seem tantalizingly within reach. And as I found on my travels, many people are now working toward those seven zeros, whether they are corporate executives with green DNA, a young woman who makes a little pocket money by renting solar lanterns to her neighbors, or a Muslim teenager with a cell phone, who can’t even say with certainty how old she is.
The End of a Myth exploring a new vision for earth’s greatest wilderness by julia whitty
photo illustration by tia magallon
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t dawn on a remote beach along Mexico’s Baja California Peninsula,
in a world of pink and red desert and forests of cardón cactus, I come upon an unlikely mass stranding of Portuguese man-of-wars, or bluebottles. They’ve come ashore in the night and their blue sails are as bright and shiny as living tissue, as if the beach were strewn with thousands of excised lungs. Their tentacles lie hopelessly tangled around them, reminiscent of dissected blood vessels, giving the otherwise peaceful morning the feel of the abattoir, as if many animals have been butchered and their larger parts consumed. Vision is the art of seeing things invisible, wrote Jonathan Swift. And sometimes the invisible is a huge, dominant, virtually omnipotent presence in our world, the feature for which our planet should have been named, and may well be named by distant intelligent beings with the means to peer farther than we can at present. The ocean is our blind spot: a deep, dark, distant, and complex realm covering 70.8 percent of Earth’s surface. We have better maps of the surface of Mars than of our own sea floor. Yet under our skin, we’re a plasma ocean, so entwined with the outer seas that we can’t easily know either ourselves or our water world. This ocean is the largest wilderness on Earth, home to wildlife in staggering multispecies aggregations, and with a lineage of life three
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billion years older than anything above sea level. Its three-dimensional realm comprises 99 percent of all habitable space and is so embedded with life as to be largely composed of life, with an ounce of seawater home to as many as 30 billion microorganisms—and counting. Honing our technological eyesight, we begin to observe what was once too small to be seen, in an exercise that mirrors infinity. For most of our time on Earth, most of what we’ve known of the ocean has been its dead oddities on the beach. The Portuguese man-ofwars must once have seemed the leftovers of immortals, rhapsody in blue Porpita porpita, stamped with the teethmarks left, commonly known as the blue butof Oceanus, Varuna, or Tan- ton, is easy prey for this blue dragon.
garoa. Modern explanations are likewise riddled with paradox, since science reveals the man-of-war to be not a jellyfish but a siphonophore, not a single body but a collection of bodies, a colony of as many as 1,000 polyps. The blue bottle bobbing at the surface, the pneumatophore, functions as an upside-down sailboat keeping the colony afloat, its inflatable sail rigged to navigate wind and waves. The nearly invisible tentacles, the dactylozooids, trail scores of feet below the boat and fish for prey with built-in stinging harpoons. The digestive polyps, the gastrozooids, cook up the catch and serve it to the pneumatophore, the dactylozooids, and the last members of the colony, the gonozooids, whose job it is to reproduce the man-of-war. Combined, the team is as integrated as a single animal. Yet absent of leadership, insight, or foresight, these strange conglomerates—we don’t know if they function as one or many beings—beach, often in blue fleets by the dozens or hundreds. As we might if our legs were separate entities from our heads, our stomachs and sex organs separate again. But we are not jellyfish. And we see the alarms, the messages inside the man-of-wars’ blue bottles joining a host of other distress signals
the ocean is so embedded with life as to be largely composed of life, with an ounce of seawater home to as many as 30 billion microorganisms
left: oxford scientific; illustration by bruce morser
washing ashore these days from oil spills, fish kills, slain cetaceans, washed-up seabirds composed in part of lethally indigestible plastic. Some are silent sirens: the disappearing seashells and horseshoe crabs, the missing sea turtles and their eggs, the vanished egg casings of sharks and rays, the lost coral debris, the dwindling beach-spawning grunion, and the anguillid eels, those long-distance travelers that migrate thousands of miles from ocean to river and back again, and appear to be evaporating from the face of the earth. Only of late have we learned to see the ocean’s surprising vulnerabilities. That it’s neither infinite nor inexhaustible. That it’s the beleaguered terminus of all our downstream pollutants, part of a dynamic system intensely interactive with land and atmosphere and everything we do there. Only in the past decade has science discovered the ocean to be fragile in the way only really enormous things are fragile: with resilience teetering on the brink of collapse. Yet our behavior lags far behind our understanding, and the ocean awaits our enlightened action.
O
ne in seven people on Earth depend on food
from the sea as their primary source of protein. Yet one of the more optimistic assessments calculates that we’ve depleted up to a third of all the world’s fisheries, with 7 percent to 13 percent of stocks collapsed, perhaps never to recover. These declines happen in our lifetime: bluefin tuna, once cheap, becomes exorbitant; species once scorned become market favorites. The ocean is Earth’s last frontier and its fish stocks are the bison we’re currently obliterating with trawlers, longliners, purse seiners, and gillnets. Modern fisheries target not only the ocean’s herbivores
nrdc a new ocean ethic
Lisa Suatoni Senior scientist in NRDC’s oceans program, based in New York, and a specialist in fisheries management and ocean acidification Historically we’ve thought of our oceans as indestructible. When did that begin to change, and why? Things began to change in the 1980s and 1990s, when advances in marine science coincided with dramatic changes in the marine environment. For example, many commercial fish populations plummeted as a result of overfishing. There were severe declines in coral reefs in the Caribbean, with outbreaks of disease and episodes of bleaching. The number of large, persistent dead zones worldwide tripled, from fewer than 100 to more than 300. Once marine scientists began rigorously quantifying these changes, alarm bells went off. This article implies the need for a new “ocean ethic.” How do we translate that into effective policy? One important step came in 2010, when President Obama’s Executive Order 13547 outlined our first-ever National Ocean Policy (NOP). This calls for the protection, maintenance, and restoration of the health and biological diversity of ocean ecosystems and resources. It requires all the relevant federal agencies to work together, as well as with coastal states and tribes, to formulate regional blueprints to prevent the haphazard development of the ocean, protect wildlife and habitats, guarantee clean water for our beaches, and provide greater certainty for coastal and ocean businesses. Knowing which areas are best for development will lead to greater efficiency, and at the same time protect important ecological areas. A new National Ocean Council will oversee the implementation of these policies, and its final plan should be out sometime this spring. What scientific advances might help us make sure that the plight of the oceans is no longer “out of sight, out of mind”? There have been some spectacular advances in “ocean observation” over the past decade. Scientists are now able to take continuous measurements of important parameters of ocean health, such as temperature, pH (acidity), nutrient concentrations, and productivity. This monitoring is akin to a doctor’s taking a patient’s vital signs. It can be used to define baselines, establish trends, and determine when an ecosystem is on the brink of undesirable change. NRDC is advocating for the funds that will be needed for the United States to establish a national observation network of ships, buoys, floats, and even sensors attached to large ocean animals, such as the bluefin tuna, so that we can learn more about their behavior and preferred habitat.
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often invisible toll. In 2010, tuna spawning partially converged in time and space with the Deepwater Horizon catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico, one of its only two known breeding areas. We don’t know the effects of 206 million gallons of oil and almost two million gallons of chemical dispersant on adult fish that came to spawn that year, or will come the next, or the next. We don’t know the outcome of unprecedented levels of pollution on delicate eggs, and therefore on entire generations of an endangered species. We may not know for years, decades, or ever. Add to that ongoing debacle the other ongoing calamities in the Gulf: the disappearing wetlands; the channelization of the Mississippi River; the overfertilization of America’s breadbasket, which downriver fuels the world’s second-largest oceanic dead zone; the laying of 36,000 miles of offshore pipeline; the drilling of 52,000 offshore wells; the thousands of rigs left abandoned. Most of what undermines the Gulf has been done with little or no consideration of its waters and wildlife, in marked contrast to our developing attitudes toward the land. In this, the battered Gulf of Mexico is a microcosm of the global ocean. Meanwhile the international body of the IUCN estimated that Atlantic bluefin tuna has declined by as much as 51 percent in only three tuna generations as a result of overfishing of adult fish by longlines, drift nets, traps, bait boats, and purse seines. Its demise may also be hastened by unregulated recreational fisheries that impose no limits on the catch of juvenile tuna, as well as, increasingly, by their capture for tuna farms. We don’t know much about the status of Atlantic bluefin tuna as larvae, when it dwells among zooplankton communities in warm surface waters. We do know that the mid-ocean gyres are now rife with plastic debris that breaks down at sea into tiny pieces, which are eaten and passed up the food web, starting with zooplankton, to endure seemingly forever, the modern immortals. We do know that phytoplankton—the microscopic organisms fueling zooplankton—which produce half of all plant matter on Earth, have declined an average of 1 percent a year since 1950, for a staggering total of 40 percent worldwide, according to one study. If nearly half of all wild and cropped plants disappeared from the terrestrial world, all animals, including humans, would likewise suffer severe depopulations. Humble phytoplankton. These are the microscopic organisms that perform on a global scale what we can’t even manage on a village scale, namely, turning sunlight into food. They are the keystone
peter scoones/photo researchers, inc.
but also its carnivores—the apex predators such as tuna, sharks, and billfish, the marine equivalent of wolves, mountain lions, and grizzlies. Of late, we’ve begun large-scale hunting of the field mice of the sea, the forage fish, such as sardines and anchovies, which form the ecological backbone of many marine food webs and which, as we’ve learned from examples off California, Peru, Japan, and Namibia, collapse catastrophically whenever the stresses of climate change intersect with the stresses of overfishing. Worse, we’re turning our guns on the ocean’s primary consumers, like krill, which, one or three trophic links removed, feed most everything else that lives in or makes its living from the sea, including us. It’s not easy to calculate the magnitude of our appetites. We visit the ocean and look forward to eating the food of the sea, even those of us who would not in our wildest dreams consider eating elephants, lions, or leopards on our visit to a dry wilderness in Africa or India. Yet it’s about more than the cost of eating wildlife. It’s also about suffering. We hook, bludgeon, net, drown, and drag to death seabirds, sea turtles, seals, dolphins, and whales in the course of hunting seafood. We blindly assume that fish feel no pain—though many scientists firmly believe otherwise—and leave unquestioned the inhumane business of slaughtering them by the billions in the wild with truly cold- dangerous drifter The Portuguese blooded detachment. man-of-war, Physalia physalis, uses its Life cycles in the sea are venomous tentacles to paralyze its prey. more complex than those of terrestrial life. Virtually all species that spend their adulthood anchored to the sea floor, such as corals, oysters, and sponges, spend their youth adrift: a two-part life history that allows them to disperse before becoming immobile. Most swimming species, such as swordfish and tuna, spend their embryo-like larval lives as translucent plankton-pickers no bigger than fingernail clippings afloat on currents. This fundamental difference in strategy between marine and terrestrial development magnifies our impacts in frightening ways. We hunt adults in one part of the ocean and destroy the nursery grounds of their larvae in another part and poison the habitat of their juveniles somewhere else while tangentially depleting the species they depend on for food at each stage. Consider the Atlantic bluefin tuna, an endangered species on the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). Overfishing contributes to its decline, yet pollutants inflict an insidious,
players not just of the sea but of all the planet. Through the process Seen through a myopic lens, changes in the ocean’s pH are a threat of photosynthesis, they produce half the oxygen we breathe, mitigate to our dinner plates and wallets. Seen through the telescope of history, the carbon dioxide we unleash into the air, and support all marine acidification may have been one of the primary “kill mechanisms” behind life. Their demise stems from a different kind of pollution, that of the grimmest of all extinctions, 252 million years ago, when nearly all atmospheric carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, which life on Earth—in the seas and on the land—perished. Recovery from the produce a warming, more stratified ocean, with less mixing between Great Dying took an astonishing 30 million years and required a near-total layers and less stirring up of nutrients from the depths to support reboot of life. In our modern ocean, beset by dwindling phytoplankton, phytoplankton on the surface. In a real sense, the ocean begins to warming waters, melting ice, rising acidity, corroding reefs, dying shellpetrify and phytoplankton to starve. fish beds, and collapsing food webs, life itself threatens to sputter out. A warming ocean also threatens to reroute the travels of drifting species, like the Portuguese man-of-war, as well as all that follow them, nderwater off a beach along Australia’s Great like endangered leatherback and loggerhead turtles. Man-of-wars Barrier Reef I come upon a living Portuguese man-of-war meander tropical and subtropical seas, adrift on wind-driven curdrifting into the winds on the crimped wonton of its blue rents. But changes in global temperature can send more rain and sail. The retractable fishing line, the dactylozooid, dangles fresh meltwater into the ocean, altering the saltiness of seawater and beneath, bouncing with the waves to connect the chattery surface therefore its density and changing the force of the powerful under- with the silent parade of floating zooplankton 15 feet below. Tucked water rivers embedded in the depths. In one of the most exciting fringelike under the sail are the digestive polyps and the reproductive scientific investigations of the twentieth century, oceanographers polyps. They are such a pale blue as to be nearly invisible and are as mapped these saltwater rivers to discover they form a system connect- reactive as exposed nerves, flinching at things I can’t see. ing all the oceans of the world into And then I can see, attached to one World Ocean. They called this one squirming polyp, the strange system the ocean conveyor because creature known as a blue dragon— it transports the rainfall from one a floating sea slug that makes its livocean basin through subsurface ing eating venomous man-of-wars. currents around the world. More It’s a fantastically beautiful creature, important, the conveyor also carries about an inch and a half long, that heat, drawing warmth from equatolooks something like a swimming rial waters to the high latitudes—a lizard with winglike legs tipped with crucial global thermostat. But now feathery toes. It lives upside down at a warmer ocean, freshened by meltthe surface, buoyed by a swallowed ing icecaps and glaciers, threatens air bubble, and not only endures the to disrupt the oceanic rivers and stinging tentacles that would send upend one of our most critical cliyou or me screaming from the water mate regulators. but also eats the most venomous of them, which it doesn’t digest but That’s not the worst of it. We know that the ocean currently seques- stores inside special sacs in its “fingertips.” Armed by its own prey—as ters about a third of our atmospheric carbon dioxide emissions—yet if you or I could eat pork and grow boar’s tusks—blue dragons are another seemingly inexhaustible service performed by these seemingly themselves formidably venomous creatures. inexhaustible waters. As we tally the true cost of this mitigation we see As far as we know, the man-of-war has no choice but to suffer this what was largely invisible even a decade ago—the other CO2 problem, nibbling thief that steals its limbs and its weapons. Onward it meanof rising carbon dioxide in the ocean unleashing a complex series of ders, an ethereally lethal self-contained society of captain, fishermen, chemical reactions that make seawater more acidic. The ocean has, since harpoonists, cooks, and procreators, adrift in seemingly perpetual the onset of the Industrial Revolution, become about 30 percent more orbit through a blue emptiness. Yet even as it’s being eaten, it eats, reeling in on its fishing line a nearly transparent juveacidic—a gargantuan change in chemistry that has visit onearth.org nile fish. Still alive, but paralyzed by venom, the tiny also reduced carbonate ion concentrations in seawater for ongoing coverage of the health of our oceans and the challenges facing victim stares unblinkingly at the approaching sail by 16 percent. Carbonate ions are needed for marine them. onearth.org/oceans of the bluebottle, at the digestive polyps wriggling life to make their shelters, their reefs and shells, which means that rising acidity threatens the survival of entire ecosystems, like blind tongues as they reach out to latch on, to form little mouths starting with phytoplankton and including coral communities, Antarctic that combine into one large mouth. When the fish is enveloped, the systems reliant on sea urchins, and many human food webs, from oyster man-of-war begins to digest its meal in a bath of corrosive enzymes. Blind and rudderless, the enmeshed trio drifts, prodded by waves beds to salmon fisheries. Nor will mobile species escape. Pteropods, or sea butterflies, the swimming snails that flap through open waters and building into surf that somersaults against the beach. The current are important fuel for temperate herring, salmon, whales, and seabirds, sweeps under them. The wind tips the bluebottle’s sail landward. Since are threatened with an acidic extinction even before the forecast rise I am not a jellyfish, I can gaze both underwater and topside toward of an ocean that will be two and a half times more acidic by 2100. The shore, where the future of their all-consuming promenade seems clear. latest research shows that fish eggs and larvae are far more vulnerable Yet not one of them appears to anticipate the invisible shoal ahead, the shipwreck onto a world without ocean. to rising acidity than scientists had imagined.
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of late, we’ve begun large-scale hunting of the field mice of the sea, the forage fish, such as sardines and anchovies, which form the ecological backbone of many marine food webs
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IN-FLIGHT SAFETY INFORMATION
E
ver since the first big wind farms were built,
some 30 years ago, environmentalists have wrestled with a dilemma: how to develop this vital clean energy source without posing an unacceptable threat to wildlife. No one knows exactly how many birds and bats are killed by wind turbines each year, but it may be more than a million. That may not sound like many—domestic cats and pesticides between them kill tens of millions of birds annually. But giant new wind farms like the one in Roscoe, Texas, with 627 turbines arrayed over 84,400 acres, will greatly increase the risk. So how can it be minimized? First, by thinking carefully about
where a wind farm should be built in the first place: well away from areas where migratory birds congregate, wetlands that attract waterfowl, and forests and grasslands that provide habitat for sensitive species. Then the engineers can take over, adjusting lighting, blade speed, tower design, even paint color, to offer greater protection. A lot more peer-reviewed science is needed to be sure that these innovations will work. But if they do, and if the industry follows new voluntary federal guidelines on wind farm siting, environmentalists may be able to reconcile their desire for clean energy with their concern for the vulnerable creatures of the air.
Most bat fatalities occur on summer and autumn nights when wind speeds are low. Deaths result not only from collisions with turbine blades but from “barotrauma”— damage to the lungs and other internal tissues from changes in air pressure. Mortality rates are particularly high among these migratory tree bats.
REDESIGN Older-style lattice towers like this are cheaper than solid columns and offer less wind resistance. But their struts also make convenient perches for birds, which may place them at greater risk.
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EARLY WARNING By detecting the approach of birds and bats, even at a distance of several miles, new radar technologies can trigger an immediate shutdown of either an individual turbine or an entire wind farm.
silver-haired Bat: michael durham; bat colony: jason edwards/national geographic stock; waxwings: white rabbit83
PRIME RISK
ON THE BLINK The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) requires wind turbines, like other tall structures, to be clearly visible to pilots at night. However, tower lighting may be attractive to birds, especially if it is kept on continuously. Flashing strobe lights may reduce the risk.
FLYING LOW Flocks of migratory birds are usually not at serious risk of colliding with turbine blades, because they travel at much higher altitudes. But fog and other poor weather conditions can force them to fly closer to the ground, bringing them into harm’s way. Nocturnally migrating passerines such as these Bohemian waxwings account for a very high proportion of bird fatalities.
slowdown When migratory patterns or weather conditions place bats and birds at elevated risk, turbines can be “feathered.” This means changing the angle of the blades so that they are parallel to the airflow, slowing or stopping their rotation. Some studies have recommended automatically feathering turbines when wind speeds are low during bats’ migration season.
To read more about NRDC’s work on threats to wildlife and endangered species, see Andrew Wetzler’s blog at switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/awetzler
A FRESH COAT
ill u stration b y st u d io 2 a
Most wind turbine towers are painted gray or white. These lighter colors attract flying insects, which in turn attract birds and bats. One study suggests that colors that reflect less infrared and ultraviolet light, like purple, may have less appeal to bugs.
Research by Amy Kraft, Susan E. Matthews, and Alyssa Noel
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for those who labor on the richest agricultural land in the nation,
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by elizabeth royte
warning labels The Seville Community Water Center in California’s Central Valley collects samples for analysis.
clean water is a luxury
When Josie Nieto
visits her relatives in Mexicali, Mexico, she luxuriates in long showers. And when she’s thirsty, she enjoys a glass of water straight from the kitchen tap. At Nieto’s own house, the water pressure is so low it can take her 45 minutes to shower and shampoo. And sometimes there’s no water at all, which is why some of her neighbors hoard water in buckets. It’s fine for laundry and houseplants, but Nieto isn’t keen on drinking the stuff. The main pipe of her community water system runs straight down the middle of an irrigation ditch. “I’ve seen dead animals in there,” Nieto says. The plastic water pipe itself suffers frequent breaks, which can allow contaminants to seep into the system. Washer screens on fixtures routinely trap sand and flecks of rust; a neighbor without a screen once drew from his tap a tall glass of polliwogs. In response to bacterial spikes, the water-system operator sends out boil-water notices, but boiling when nitrate levels rise would only concentrate the tasteless, odorless compound. So frequent are these alternating messages that Nieto neither drinks nor cooks with her tap water. Curiously, Nieto doesn’t live in Mexico, or in any other developing nation that routinely struggles with water quality and quantity. She lives on the eastern side of one of the most productive agricultural areas in the world, the flat-bottomed bowl of California’s San Joaquin Valley. And yet in 2009 and 2010, when the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the human right to safe drinking water and sanitation set out to collect data and draw attention to communities that lack clean water, she visited not only Namibia, Senegal, and Bangladesh but also Nieto’s hometown of Seville, in Tulare County. An unincorporated village of just a few streets, one gas station, and an elementary school, Seville is engirdled by agriculture. Avocado, citrus, and nut trees stretch to the distant horizon, interrupted only by row after row of table grapes; fields of cotton, corn, and alfalfa; and dairies that confine thousands of cows in dusty corrals. (Tulare County is the biggest milk producer in the nation.) Such bounty was unimaginable when this region was first settled in the mid-nineteenth century. Then, farmers on the valley’s eastern side grew dry-land wheat on hardpan soils and prayed that neither drought nor deluge from Sierra Nevada snowmelt would wipe out their crops. But in the 1890s, laborers began constructing the hundreds of miles of canals, ditches, and headgates that would channel and control the four great rivers—the Kings,
photographs by cynthia perez
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Kaweah, Kern, and Tule—that tumbled out of the mountains. With a thirst for justice Maria Herrera is upset that the pipe carrying railroads to transport crops and a dependable supply of water, farmers drinking water to Seville runs through this polluted irrigation ditch. soon diversified. Packinghouses, storage warehouses, and labor camps sprang up. No one could have predicted at the time that the irrigation when the State Water Resources Control Board sampled 181 domestic water that turned a semi-arid desert into a horn of plenty would eventually wells in Tulare County, which lies near the middle of the valley, an threaten the health of those who lived among and worked those fields. astonishing 40 percent had nitrate levels above the federal limit of Established by the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway in 1913, 45 micrograms per liter. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that Seville is home to roughly 480 residents, most of them Hispanic and across the United States, up to 15 percent of wells in both agricultural poor, many of them farm laborers. The community and urban areas exceed federal levels for nitrate. water system serves 83 percent of the population, Nitrate is formed when nitrogen, present in will the including the Nietos; the rest of Seville’s residents all living organisms and in synthetic fertilizer, water sicken a rely on their own wells, which draw from the same combines in soil with oxygen. Farmers apply nihealthy adult aquifer as the town supply. trogen-rich fertilizers to increase their yields, but today? what about The hydrologically astute will note a striking even under ideal conditions, plants take up only over 50 years? the disparity: while poor people in tiny towns drink 50 percent to 60 percent of the nutrient. What’s groundwater that could be making them sick, left can easily seep into both groundwater and answers aren’t pomegranates and almonds thrive on river water surface water, where it contributes to algal blooms clear. that is relatively pure. But in a state where the right and dead zones. Nitrate in water may derive from to capture river flows is fiercely adjudicated—and both humans and natural mineral deposits or airborne deposition, but its major sources delta smelt, among other environmental constituents, have legal claim to are leaking septic systems, wastewater treatment plants, inorganic more water than the state’s rivers sometimes hold—almost 90 percent fertilizer, and discharges from food processors, feedlots, dairies, and of San Joaquin Valley residents rely on groundwater for domestic use. other confined animal feeding operations (CAFOs). Considering The contamination is hardly limited to Seville. Between 10 percent Tulare County’s bovine population (nearly half a million cows, producing and 15 percent of California’s community-supply wells exceed federal 9.9 million tons of organic fertilizer a year) and the vast acreage treated nitrate standards, and the highest number of those tainted wells are with synthetic fertilizer, it’s not surprising that nitrate is the greatest located in the San Joaquin Valley, which also has some of the highest contaminant threat to California’s drinking water. In fact, nitrate is the rates of poverty and percentages of minorities in the state. In 2006, most common chemical contaminant of groundwater worldwide—a this article was made possible by a grant from furthermore, a program of the J. M. Kaplan fund 4 8 onearth
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problem that will only get worse as the population increases, farmers spread more fertilizer, and warmer temperatures diminish freshwater supplies and concentrate contaminant levels. In 1974 the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) set a maximum level for nitrate in drinking water to protect against health risks including blue-baby syndrome, a potentially fatal condition that reduces the blood’s capacity to carry oxygen. Exposure to high levels of nitrate has also been linked to pregnancy complications, including birth defects and premature birth, dysfunction of the spleen and kidneys, respiratory tract infections, pancreatitis, and cancer of the digestive system, bladder, and thyroid. Sitting in the dimly lit living room of a Seville neighbor, Nieto tells me that her granddaughter has spina bifida. Three other family members have problems with their thyroid. “But we can’t link it with the water,” Nieto says, shrugging. “We’re surrounded by agriculture here.” Her implication is clear: risk factors abound. The application of pesticides and fertilizers is ubiquitous, and particulate matter and ozone pollute the valley’s air. Unfortunately, there haven’t been any longitudinal studies on high nitrate levels and illness in the area (although death rates in Tulare County from diseases associated with high nitrate are double, or more than double, state rates), and many residents are poor, and therefore less likely than others to receive adequate health care. Although Nieto doesn’t drink or cook with her tap water, she still pays $60 a month for water service. (San Francisco families spend, on average, half that amount for pristine water piped from Yosemite National Park.) She spends an additional $60 a month on bottled and vended water for her husband and herself. When her three daughters visit, she asks them to bring potable water from their homes and uses it to bathe her grandkids, anxious about the risks of bacteria. For middle-income families, an extra $60 a month might not hurt. But the Nietos aren’t middle income. “I could use that money for food,” Nieto says. “I could use the money for gas,” Becky Quintana, a neighbor, chimes in. According to an analysis by the Pacific Institute, the costs of public water service plus the costs of avoiding that water (including filtration systems and bottled and vended water) constitute 4.6 percent of median household income in the San Joaquin Valley—more than three times what the EPA considers affordable. Some Tulare County families spend nearly 10 percent of their income on water.
illustration by bruce morser
The heart of Seville’s drinking-water system is one
550-gallon tank, one well with a pump (no backup), and an inadequate booster pump, all segregated behind a chain-link fence. For years, a hand-painted board offered a phone number for reporting any problems. “But the number was disconnected,” Maria Herrera, the outreach coordinator for the Community Water Center, an advocacy group based in nearby Visalia, says, rolling her eyes. (The number was recently updated.) The well’s nitrate level has, for the past several years, fluctuated from just below the legal limit to just over. The result, for customers, is frustrated confusion. No one knows exactly when nitrate levels spike or when they drop (concentrations tend to be higher in the dry season). Nor do they know exactly how nitrate may affect their health. Will the water sicken a healthy adult today? What about over 50 years? The answers aren’t clear. Even those who speak English as their first language scratch their heads over the often-convoluted wording of water-quality
nrdc the thirsty state
Noah Garrison attorney in NRDC’s Santa Monica office, specializing in stormwater pollution and water supply issues in California
Is groundwater pollution in California limited to the communities in Tulare County featured in this story? No, the problem is widespread. While nitrate pollution is particularly common in the Central Valley, pollution from pesticides, salts, and other contaminants is a constant threat to drinking-water supplies for millions of Californians. NRDC brought a series of successful lawsuits against dairy farms in the Chino Basin that resulted in efforts to clean up these operations and prevent further pollution of surface water (our rivers, lakes, and streams) and groundwater. But in other parts of the state, agricultural and industrial activities still threaten groundwater quality. Why exactly is the groundwater system in such trouble? California is by far the country’s largest user of groundwater; roughly 11 billion gallons are pumped from our aquifers every day. Yet we have the weakest groundwater laws in the nation. In most parts of the state, you don’t even need a permit for withdrawals. The result is often “overdraft,” meaning that more groundwater is pumped from aquifers than can be replenished naturally. This can lead to falling groundwater levels, land subsidence, contamination of water supplies, and harm to ecosystems that rely on groundwater for a steady, year-round supply. Worse, when more water is pumped from an aquifer than is replaced, the voids and spaces in the surrounding rock that hold water can be flattened under the weight of earth, and that water storage capacity is lost forever. A recent report by NASA estimated that overdraft in the Central Valley averages nearly one and a half trillion gallons a year. Californians are literally pumping their state dry. What is the impact of the prolonged drought in the West? Groundwater meets 30 percent of California’s annual water needs, and in periods of drought that can rise to 40 percent. So it’s a vital source of supply and a critical hedge against shortages. Unfortunately, as pollution and overdraft increasingly threaten our groundwater, climate change is threatening our surface water supplies. The Sierra Nevada snowpack, which forms California’s largest reservoir of freshwater and is a major source for stream and river flows, is projected to shrink by as much as 70 percent to 90 percent by the end of the century. So groundwater will only become a more critical resource— and one that the state should be doing much more to protect.
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Identifying possible solutions to water problems and ways to pay for reports and alerts. Governor Jerry Brown recently signed legislation requiring drinking-water alerts to be translated when 10 percent or more them can be extremely challenging in tiny towns. Herrera makes this of a water district’s customers speak a language other than English. idea concrete for me in the unincorporated community of East Orosi, But warnings don’t always reach the intended recipients, Nieto says. a few miles north of Seville. Driving slowly past small houses on dusty “The notices blow off the door, or the landlord doesn’t let renters know. streets, she points out the town’s two wells, each of which regularly exceeds the legal limit for nitrate. “And that’s the Community Services Once, I saw a bunch of notices in the trash can of the school.” Like Nieto, Herrera grew up in Tulare County. Worried about tap- District office,” she says, indicating a graffiti-smeared trailer that’s open water quality, her family hauled five-gallon jugs of water home every just two hours a week for customers to pay their water bills. “This is week. “My parents were farm workers, and they sacrificed a lot to buy where the board meets,” she says in a tone of exasperation. “There’s bottled water and food for us kids. We didn’t go to the movies; we rarely no room for anyone, so there’s little community participation. The district can’t get a quorum.” Nor can it afford an engineer. had store-bought cereal in the house.” One potential fix for East Orosi lies a quarter mile to the east. “This Herrera has long brown hair and rounded features. She wears tight blue jeans and sneakers, waves to friends as she drives through small is the Friant-Kern Canal,” Herrera says, parking beside the 152-milelong, concrete-lined ditch that towns, and apologizes before delivers Sierra snowmelt to checking her phone for mesmore than a million acres of sages, which she does at the farmland on the San Joaquin rate one might expect of a fullValley’s eastern side. “This is time community organizer and what everyone’s fighting over.” mother of four. She sighs. “Some towns with Before coming to the Combad water are trying to get permunity Water Center, Herrera mission to tap into it, but they’d worked as a store clerk and as have to build a treatment plant, a fruit inspector for the state because it’s surface water.” (walking through a field in Perhaps even more difficult, Seville, she doesn’t hesitate those towns would also have to pluck a fig and take a bite). to wrest water rights from es“I hired Maria because she’s tablished users—whether farmers or municipalioutspoken and smart, and she’d been engaged ties—as the canal’s flow is entirely allocated. So in advocacy issues at her son’s school,” Laurel “Ag doesn’t close, I think as I peer down into the clear, cold Firestone, co-director of the center, says. It didn’t want to give up flow, and yet so far away. matter to her that Herrera wasn’t up to speed on water for people,” Elsewhere in California, communities have the movement of nitrate through groundwater or says chris kapheim, addressed their nitrate problems by digging new how to apply for water-infrastructure funding. Hergeneral manager wells (this won’t work in areas where the water tarera could learn all that on the job. What mattered ble is already contaminated) or deepening existing most to Firestone was that Herrera “understands of the alta wells (although deeper wells are, in some places as much as anyone what it’s like to live with these irrigation district in the valley, vulnerable to arsenic contamination). issues day to day.” Herrera has a natural instinct for social justice. She has a deep Some have built sophisticated water-treatment plants, which can remove empathy for anyone who gets a raw deal, and she doesn’t hesitate to nitrate as well as the pesticide dibromochloropropane (DBCP), a carcinassign blame. “We’ve had no leadership from the people responsible ogen that, although banned in 1979, still shows up in valley water, and for our water resources,” she says. “They haven’t done their jobs.” And 1,2,3-Trichloropropane (TCP), a suspected human carcinogen used so Herrera has trained her children to ask, when they’re away from as a binder in parasitic worm-killers. Four hours southeast of Tuhome, “Can I drink the water here?” before sipping from a fountain lare County, for example, the Inland Empire Utilities Agency, which or tap. “I drink tap water only when I’m in Sacramento,” Herrera says. serves roughly 850,000 people in San Bernardino County, is building a “It feels really different, and really good, to walk up to a fountain and $300 million plant that uses reverse osmosis to strip nitrate and other contaminants from groundwater in a region that’s steadily losing citrus do what you’re supposed to do.” For people with safe water, it’s hard to imagine how widespread the groves and dairy corrals to subdivisions and parking lots. Two key impacts of bad water can be. Besides threatening health and pinching differences between the Seville service area and the Inland Empire household budgets, poor water quality has, across the San Joaquin service area are nearly 2,000 times the number of ratepayers and more Valley, contributed to the denial of loans and lower real estate values, than three times the median household income. and has reduced the tax base of many towns. Without good water, landowners have little incentive to build on their property. Seville is Water quality on the eastern side of the San Joaquin Valley speckled with unimproved lots. “People need affordable housing,” has historically been poor. Part of the problem is geological: the water Herrera says. “These communities want to grow.” Indeed, the popula- table is shallow and vulnerable to contaminants, and the soil has a tion of the Central Valley, which encompasses the San Joaquin Valley, 35-foot layer of hardpan clay, starting at a depth of five feet, that inhibits is projected to increase from 3.8 million to 6 million by 2020. drainage. (In the early 1900s, the water table was 10 feet down; now, 5 0 onearth
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map by baker vail
thanks to overpumping, it’s 20 to 30 feet lower.) But the problem is also demographic. Small towns often don’t have enough utility customers to fund repairs and upgrades. And in systems serving higher proportions of Latinos, write a group of scientists in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, “language abilities, citizenship status, or lack of political clout could inhibit residents from speaking out and demanding improvements in water quality.” The Tulare County General Plan of 1971 institutionalized discrimination against some unincorporated towns, stating that communities deemed to have “little or no authentic future” would, as a consequence of being denied such infrastructure as sewer and water systems, “enter a process of long term, natural decline as residents depart for improved opportunities in nearby communities.” Withering is no longer part of Tulare’s official plan, but this attitude still lingers. Speaking of nitrate contamination, Richard Schafer, an engineer who sits on the Tulare County Water Commission, says, “This is just a few little communities creating a problem for the entire valley. These people created the problem with their own septic tanks, and now they want someone else to pay for it. They should move to cities with treatment plants, and we should abolish these small communities.” Comments like these bring out the fiery best in Herrera, and they keep her coming back to places like Monson, an island of tightly clustered houses with contaminated wells rising from a sea of dairies and grape and pomegranate fields. Going house to house here in scorching weather, battling barking dogs and wary residents, Herrera didn’t at first make much headway. “I told them clean drinking water is a human right, not a privilege,” she says, sipping from a bottle of Aquafina. “Some of the older residents said, ‘Why should we bother? We’re out the door.’” Herrera asked them to consider their children: “Don’t you want to leave something for them?” Gradually, they realized that securing good water was an investment in their future. “People here want the same thing as anyone else—basic services,” Herrera says in her nononsense tone. “When they saw others like themselves organizing, it created a momentum.” Eventually residents persuaded the nearby town of Sultana, which meets federal nitrate standards, to consider extending its water lines to Monson—a process known as consolidation. That was a big step, because without an official water provider, Monson wouldn’t be eligible for state funds. In 2006, California’s Proposition 84 authorized $180 million, through the Department of Public Health, to remediate chemical and nitrate contaminants in small community drinking-water systems, with priority given to “disadvantaged” communities (as measured by median household income). But competition for that money is stiff, and the process favors communities that can hire engineers and consultants to navigate the tortuous application process. Hurdles constantly arise. You’re not shovel ready? Go to the back of the line. Your district isn’t
currently in violation of California’s Safe Drinking Water Act? Ditto. Say your community wins a grant for new infrastructure. Will it be able to pay for the system’s maintenance and operations? Prop 84 covers only capital costs. “The communities that are impacted the most, and for the longest time,” Herrera says, “are the same communities that lack the resources to push through these obstacles.” With the help of the Community Water Center, Seville has applied to the state for a $600,000 grant to launch the multiyear process of building a new town system. But Seville, and other towns in similar straits, including Monson, are pinning their long-term hopes on importing safe water from the Alta Project, a proposed plan that would supply surface water to the region. “Ag doesn’t want to give up water for people,” says Chris Kapheim, general manager of the Alta Irrigation District, which waters 130,000 acres in parts of three counties with a significant portion of the Kings River. “But we can add to the supply by ramping up the district’s water storage program.” With a grant from the State Water Resources Control Board, Alta has already started building ditches and pipes to channel stormwater and wet-year river surpluses into shallow earthen basins, which look like retention ponds and fill with dust-coated weeds in the dry season. As water accumulates in the basins, it settles into the earth, creating a water bank from which disadvantaged communities can draw. But not without cleaning up the supply first. The irrigation district has also applied for California Department of Public Health funding to build a treatment plant that would blend surface water with groundwater; filter, treat, and disinfect the resulting mix; then send it off to thirsty Seville, Yettem, Cutler, and East Orosi. Though the funding isn’t in place yet, the Community Water Center’s Firestone is hopeful. “This plant could be a model for the region,” she says. “Just getting these small communities together was a huge breakthrough.” Of all the possible solutions to nitrate-contaminated water
—including deepening or moving wells, blending bad water with good, building treatment plants that remove pollutants, and interconnecting small towns with larger, safer systems—only one addresses the problem systematically: reducing nitrogen at the source. But what is the source? As in most places, nitrogen in the Central Valley comes largely from human and animal waste and from synthetic fertilizer, of which California farmers apply roughly 700,000 tons a year. Because of varying topography, soil types, rainfall, and irrigation practices, says Thomas Harter, a University of California, Davis, groundwater hydrologist, “you can’t easily say the nitrates in this well are because of this field or that septic tank. The nitrates are continuously distributed over an incredibly varied landscape.” They also move readily through the water table, and they linger in groundwater for decades: isotope testing has identified nitrate applied as fertilizer as far back as the 1950s. spring 2012
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This uncertainty provides plausible deniability for nearly any ag- ment plans will be made public and that the expense of compliance will grieved party. Don’t like the synthetic fertilizer hypothesis? Blame the either push them out of business or substantially raise the price of food. nitrate on wastewater treatment plants. Or take a poke at the dairies, “I’m not sure we could survive with no chemicals,” Chris Kapheim, who or, like Shafer, deny that nitrate is a significant problem. “The farm recently sold his tree-fruit and grape farms to a larger operation, says. “There’s a balance of sustainability and realistic objectives and affordbureau basically says, ‘Show us the dead babies,’” Firestone says. “It’s reasonable to say that agriculture has some impact on the ground- ability of product. We don’t want to drive small farmers off.” Dairies, which spread their manure on cropland that feeds their water,” Jack Brandt, a large fruit grower and packer in Reedley, northeast of Seville, says. “But it’s hard to say whether this guy here or that guy confined herds, are already under state order to reduce nitrogen runoff. there is the source. In this part of the Central Valley, you can’t walk 200 In 2007, operators were required to begin filing nutrient manageyards outside a city limit without hitting an irrigation well. You don’t know ment plans with local water boards and to report the nitrogen levels in their manure, plant tissue, wells, and ditches. what you’ll find in the water or who put it there.” Discharging manure water into surface water or Even those worried about drinking their own “i told them clean off-property was forbidden, and operators were tap water are reluctant to point fingers at the indrinking water is required to line new manure lagoons with plastic dustry that provides their livelihood or that of (existing lagoons were grandfathered in). their neighbors. They may believe that tainted a human right,” According to J. P. Cativiela, a spokesman for water—as well as the cost of avoiding it—is simherrera says, the industry group Dairy CARES (Community ply the price one has to pay for the San Joaquin sipping from a Alliance for Responsible Environmental StewValley to continue generating more than $9 billion bottle of aquafina ardship), these measures, which cost operators worth of food a year. $20,000 to $30,000 a year, have significantly Firestone has no interest in pursuing individual polluters, but she’s hopeful that the state’s new Irrigated Lands Regu- reduced runoff incidents. But it’s unlikely that nitrate levels have latory Program will make a difference. The ILRP will classify farms dropped much below those reported in 2008, when many dairies had based on their risk of contaminating drinking water, then require those levels two, four, or more times higher than drinking water standards. considered likely to pollute in high-risk areas to formulate management The industry successfully lobbied for a one-year delay in filing nutrient plans to reduce their impact—for example, making adjustments in the management plans, from 2010 until 2011. Even up and running, the volume and timing of fertilizer applications. “This is a big deal,” Herrera requirements may not be strongly enforced. The Central Valley water says, as irrigators have largely been exempt from federal Clean Water board has manpower sufficient to inspect dairies only once every five years, and it has generally failed to levy fines against habitual violators. Act regulations. While some environmental groups are skeptical that the new program In the past, years have gone by between notices of violation and the will be adequately protective (the Central Valley Regional Water Quality resolution of problems. Realistically, Thomas Harter says, “it could be decades until nitrate Control Board has a history of leniency toward big ag), the biggest pushback comes from—no surprise—farmers, who worry that their manage- concentrations improve or get below the drinking water limit,” in part 5 2 onearth S p r i n g 2 0 1 2
small-town values Often forced to buy bottled water, Central Valley residents like Josie Nieto, left, and Julius McConnell, right, can end up spending four times as much on water as residents of San Francisco.
because of such delays and in part because of the lag between application of nitrogen and its appearance in wells. But this is no reason to give up. Nitrate contamination is preventable, and mitigation efforts have proved effective. In Wisconsin, education programs, mandatory soil testing, and paying farmers to plant crops that are less nitrogen-dependent than corn reduced nitrate to safe levels in less than 10 years. In Denmark, nitrate reduction measures were launched in the mid-1980s; since then, increased regulation and technical improvements in farming have decreased surplus nitrogen in groundwater by 40 percent—while crop yields have held steady and animal production has increased. In the long run, preventing nitrate pollution is far less expensive than cleaning up water at the point of consumption. But that message, which implies the need to change land-use practices, could take years to percolate through regulatory agencies and onto farm fields. It has always been easier to pour concrete than to shift a paradigm. Of the 100 nitrate mitigation projects on the California Department of Public Health’s priority list for funding, not one proposes “wellhead protection”—which means managing land use within a source area—as a strategy to prevent contamination. The drinking-water problems of the eastern Central Valley
are a consequence of the hydrological civilization that harnessed the Sierra Nevada’s snowmelt and allowed farms and powerful agribusiness interests to expand exponentially. The Central Valley gives us cheap food, and lots of it. But the human and environmental price of high yields and low cost may not be worth the bargain. To solve the valley’s waterquality problems, then, may require far more than utilities filtering at the back end or asking farmers to modify their application of fertilizer at
the front. The solution could mean fundamental and dramatic changes in agriculture, including growing fewer low-value, water-intensive crops like cotton and alfalfa; ending subsidies that prop up CAFOs and commodity crops; and shifting from a reliance on synthetic fertilizer to sustainable farming methods. These would include more efficient use of water, the use of composted animal manures, and the planting of cover crops, which are grown to improve soil visit onearth.org quality, not for food. for Elizabeth Royte’s blog about water, waste, and whatever else is on her Cultural changes are also in order, mind. onearth.org/theroytestuff including a drastic decline in meat and dairy consumption (cows are the primary consumers of the nation’s corn, the most nitrogen-intensive field crop we grow) and a reduction in food waste (between farm and fork, Americans waste almost half the food produced in this country). The solution likely includes a return to regional food systems that support small- and medium-scale growing and processing operations and possibly an acceptance of higher food prices, along with more government programs to help those who can’t afford them. None of this, of course, is going to be politically easy or come quickly. But for Josie Nieto and others who have long been hauling—and paying a premium for—potable water, change, however incremental, can’t come soon enough. Nieto steps outside the house and gestures east, beyond the golden foothills toward the smog-obscured Sierras. “Millions of people come through here every year, heading toward Sequoia and Kings Canyon National Park,” the source of the region’s purest water. “People just don’t connect these kinds of water problems with the United States,” she says. “ They have no idea that the people who live in these little towns can’t drink the water coming out of their taps.” Elizabeth Royte is a contributing editor to OnEarth. Her most recent book is Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It. spring 2012
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Reviews
the american way of eating by Tracie McMillan Scribner, 336 pp., $25
our unhappy meals
E
Millions labor to put food on our tables, earning barely enough to feed themselves by tom philpott
very year, Americans drop a cool $1.2 trillion on feeding
their appetites. That’s a lot of Big Macs and stuffed-to-groaning shopping carts—and billions of dollars in profits for the handful of companies that dominate our food system. Planting, harvesting, processing, displaying, and cooking that vast hoard of grub, of course, requires veritable armies of workers. Keeping it cheap and plentiful for consumers, while also profitable for the food industry, means those workers generally get paid very little. The 11 million people who staff the nation’s restaurants earn average wages of just over $10 an hour. The 230,000 people who plant and harvest our crops would consider that an improvement; their average pay is just $9.64 an hour. Meatpacking workers are, relatively speaking, the aristocrats of the system: the 83,000 men and women who slog through the blood and guts of our meat supply get $11.60 an hour for their trouble. In all of these occupations, workers bring home average annualized wages that land them below or just above the poverty line for a family of four. So what’s it like to work at the base of the food pyramid, amid the pig entrails and the pesticide clouds? One problem in parsing this question is that the people who feed us are essentially invisible. Beyond a youthful stint waiting tables or flipping burgers, most middle-class-and-up people rarely come into contact with workers at the bottom end of our food system.
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In her important new book, The American Way of Eating, Tracie McMillan illuminates this murky yet vital sector of our economy. In her year of research, she embedded herself in the Big Food trenches and (to paraphrase Kafka) scribbled down what she saw among the ruins. She worked undercover stints in California farm fields, at two Walmart stores in Michigan, and at an Applebee’s in Brooklyn, living on the wages she eked out, often alongside the people with whom she toiled. McMillan has committed a brave act of immersion reportage, applying to the food system the techniques of Barbara Ehrenreich’s classic 2001 chronicle of working-poor life, Nickel and Dimed. She’s also working in terrain mapped out by Eric Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation (2001) and Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma (2006), which galvanized a budding movement to interrogate and transform the food system. McMillan brings to the topic one thing that Schlosser and Pollan didn’t: a hard-won sense of the U.S. class system, from the bottom looking up. Schlosser’s book exposed brutal working conditions with a muckraker’s zeal, but we never heard much from the workers themselves, and Pollan completely omitted labor from his “natural history of four meals.” The American Way of Eating, by contrast, invites us to imagine what it feels like to work within what Pollan and others call the “industrial food system.” McMillan, as she tells us in the introduction, grew up near hardscrabble Flint, Michigan, the child of a working-class father and a termi-
Erik Freeland/Corbis
wordsimagesideas
nally ill mother. The family diet ranged from Hamburger Helper to simple from-scratch Sunday meals. Perhaps because of this cash-strapped youth, McMillan writes of her experiences among the working poor without a whiff of condescension or exoticism. Before getting to the book’s other considerable merits, I should note one conceptual flaw. In her introduction, McMillan writes that the American way of eating is characterized by the “simultaneous, contradictory, relentless presence of scarce nutrition” amid plenty. More pithily, she says that “our agriculture is abundant but healthy diets are not.” All well enough put, but she frames what follows as an “investigation into just how America came to eat this way, why we keep doing it, and what it would take to change it.” While the book does throw off insights into these questions, they don’t really form its substance. Working in a California farm field or at a suburban Walmart for insight into how the food system morphed into its current state is a bit like embedding yourself in an army platoon to gain insight into the causes of war. Where McMillan sparkles is in describing the relationships she forms and the coping mechanisms she develops as she makes her way through the grueling, ill-paid job opportunities offered by our food system. The sections on farm work are particularly striking. She describes the strange and awkward negotiations required for a “white girl” to find work in a labor market dominated by brown men from points south of the border. Her experience as the Other among Others drives home the ethnic and racial stratification of farm work. College-educated white kids may flock to work on smallscale organic farms, but they’re not rushing to do piecework in vast grape and garlic fields for a few dollars an hour.
McMillan’s first forays into farm crisis such as Hurricane Katrina labor don’t go well. She learns or the 1906 San Francisco earthquickly that this menial work quake, “most people are altruistic, actually requires skill and care: urgently engaged in caring for you try getting up at 4:45 in the themselves and those around morning and spending your day them, strangers and neighbors snipping grape bunches, paring as well as friends and loved them down to look perfect, and ones.” In McMillan’s networks stacking them carefully enough to of care, people pool resources, avoid damage yet rapidly enough share cooking duties, and look to make up for a crushingly low out for each other in the fields, piece rate. Withering under the coming to the aid of those who excoriating heat of California’s work too slowly to make decent Central Valley, doubled over in money. Obviously, the system the bathroom of a public library is highly fragile and people fall and unable to work anymore, she through the cracks. But McMilasks, “Whose f***ing idea was it lan makes clear that she survived to grow food in a desert?” in the fields for as long as she Whose idea, indeed? As McMil- did—just a few months—through lan makes clear, the main asset of the kindness of the friends she the Central Valley as a produce- made. It’s true that her whiteness growing region (beyond long, and youth made her an object of sunny days) turns out to be the fascination; but I left the section power of its landowners to im- on farm labor wondering how any port and consume cheap labor individual worker can endure the and water from afar. It would conditions in our vegetable fields be no stretch to describe their without being part of a tight-knit treatment of labor as criminal. support group. Contractors routinely underpay The American Way of Eating workers. Employers are obliged brims with such uncomfortable under California law to pay farm insights. Walmart has been workers a minimum wage of $8 an hailed for the hyperefficiency hour, but many never do. McMil- of its operations, but in the lan reports that the garlic pickers Detroit store where McMillan she worked with are paid $1.60 finds work, the chaotic produce for every bucket they harvest, at department is about as well-run least some of the crop destined as an army platoon in Joseph to be sold in Walmart and Whole Heller’s Catch-22. As for the Foods. But even the most profi- A p p l e b e e ’ s i n B r o o k l y n , cient can fill only four buckets an McMillan outs it as a kind of hour, which maquiladora visit onearth.org amounts to of food: meals for ongoing coverage of food issues $6.40. How do are slapped in Barry Estabrook’s blog. onearth.org/politicsoftheplate labor contractogether from tors hide the all manner of discrepancy? By lying about the prefab, factory-made slop and hours worked, adjusting them then zapped in the microwave downward so the math works by people who have no trainout to meet the state-mandated ing in food safety. This section minimum. contains the most painful truth McMillan sets out to discover of all: the vulnerability of young how people persevere in the face women locked in exhausting, of these substandard wages, long low-wage jobs to sexual abuse, and hard work days, and crowded as McMillan learns in chilling living conditions. Her answer re- fashion when she is assaulted by minded me of Rebecca Solnit’s a co-worker. Sometimes, Solnit’s argument in her 2009 book, A “paradise built in hell” devolves Paradise Built in Hell: in times of into hell without paradise.
Overall, this excellent book may not deliver much new insight into how the food system got to be the way it is, or precisely how it might be reformed to be more fair for the people who feed the rest of us. But by uncovering the largely hidden and routinely dire conditions faced by those millions of workers, it drives home how urgently such reform is needed.
The kunstlercast Conversations With James Howard Kunstler BY Duncan crary New Society Publishers, 300 pp., $16.95
Like so many Americans
of Generation X, I grew up in the suburbs, amid homes on large lots facing streets designed for cars, not people. My parents drove me everywhere, until my friends and I could get behind the wheel ourselves. Even then, we never really had anywhere to go. We hung out at the Denny’s or in parking lots or in friends’ basements— or, when really desperate, the mall. We never considered (we were teenagers, after all) that there might be an alternative, that the stale, bland suburban life we were living was less than half a century old and completely at odds with the way humans had lived for the previous millennia. Only later, when I started covering local politics for a small newspaper in Pennsylvania, did I start to understand that the suburbs were a strange construct made possible
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reviews
by American middle-class prosperity in the second half of the twentieth century. One thing that helped me understand this was reading James Howard Kunstler’s landmark 1993 book, The Geography of Nowhere, which traced the evolution of American communities from Main Streets and sidewalks to strip malls and culs-de-sac and made an over whelming case that we are paying huge social and economic costs for our carcrazed lifestyle. My fellow Gen X journalist Duncan Crary tells pretty much the same stor y of awakening slowly to the ills of suburbia, but with one difference: the small paper for which he covered local politics was in the town where Kunstler had started his own reporting career. Kunstler, who had settled in nearby Saratoga Springs, New York, and added dystopian novelist to his résumé, became a source for Crary’s reporting on suburban land use—a relationship that has continued throughout Crary’s journalism career. In 2007 Crar y discovered podcasting and decided to get Kunstler in front of a microphone for weekly discussions about the “tragic comedy of suburban sprawl.” The results, collected in book form as The KunstlerCast: Conversations With James Howard Kunstler, make an enjoyable exploration for Kunstler devotees and newbies alike. Crary leads Kunstler through the arc of his prolific pontificating career, starting with The Geography of Nowhere and proceeding through a series of similarly themed polemics up to The Long Emergency, published in 2005, which predicts a radical shift in our way of life as oil production dwindles and alternative energy sources (in Kunstler’s estimation) fail to fill the gap, leading to the downfall of our global consumer 5 6 onearth
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culture. (For those who accuse him of being a secretly delighted “doomer,” finding joy in apocalyptic scenarios, there’s plenty of material in The KunstlerCast to bolster that argument—though he heartily denies it.) Crary picked a fortuitous time to get Kunstler on tape: just as the American suburbs he had long denigrated began to show signs of collapse, thanks to the 2008 financial crisis and mortgage debacle. Kunstler’s perspective on the causes of collapse and the subsequent bank bailouts and stimulus plans—a “campaign to sustain the unsustainable”—is dismal. Home values, he predicts, will continue to sink. Personal wealth will wither. Large swaths of U.S. cities will empty out like Detroit. But Kunstler is convinced our suburban way of life, which he calls “the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world,” isn’t worth saving anyway. Reading four years of weekly conversations condensed into a book is a somewhat strange experience. Crary, who admits to thinking he had found the easiest way of writing a book ever, does an admirable job of organizing his wide-ranging conversations with Kunstler into a form that’s relatively easy to follow. He’s mostly an endorsing acolyte, but he does challenge Kunstler on some uncomfortable subjects, including his condemnation of youth culture (our young men have become warrior babies and violent clowns, Kunstler chides). I found myself lamenting that the book had been finished before the Occupy movement took shape. Surely Kunstler’s views would align with the 99% protesters in some respects, but how would he evaluate their message and methods? Fortunately, this is a book whose sequel is, in a sense, already available. The podcasts continue at kunstlercast.com, so it’s easy enough to download and find out. —scott dodd
bird on fire Lessons From the World’s Least Sustainable City BY Andrew Ross Oxford, 297 pp., $27.95
Phoenix has a terrible
reputation in environmental circles. It uses a huge amount of water for a desert community— more than twice the per capita rate of Seattle, which gets nearly 39 inches of rainfall a year—and pumps most of it more than 300 miles uphill from the overtaxed Colorado River. Its air is brown with smog; its shadeless concrete landscape absorbs heat. And its black and Latino neighborhoods are cesspools of toxic
waste. The recipe that created Phoenix seems fairly straightforward, says Andrew Ross, a cultural critic at New York University: “low taxes, light regulation, antiunion labor laws, cheap land and cheaper water, and big federal funding for defense industries and suburban infrastructure.” The city’s economy is largely dependent on construction and other industries tied to population growth—a strategy that is obviously not sustainable. One reaction is to turn away in horror from this sprawling, overheated monster. Instead, Ross made repeated visits over two years, interviewing more than 200 people to try to understand how Phoenix came to be what it is and determine whether there’s any way it can be turned around. “If Phoenix could become sustainable, then it could be done anywhere,” he reasons. There’s no point basking in the good news about places like Portland, Oregon, that are becoming yearly more sustainable and eco-aware without also gazing, as it were, into the eyes of the enemy. Cities like Phoenix, he writes, cannot be “written off as hopeless cases. They are simply
Freezes and Junes She laid bricks arranged in Vs underneath the garden’s rage of blossom. After her death, after the freezes of many winters, her bricks rise and dip undulant by the wellhead, in summer softened by moss, and in deep June I see preterite, revenant poppies fix, waver, fix, waver, fix… —B y D ona l d H a l l
illustration by blair thornley
the weakest links in a chain that has to be strengthened tenfold” if the planet is to remain livable in the face of climate change. So can Phoenix ever become sustainable? Ross skeptically recounts the 2009 initiative from Mayor Phil Gordon to make it “the greenest city in America,” which mostly seems to mean centrally planned technological fixes, from mass transit to an aggressive expansion of solar power achieved by wooing foreign solar energy concerns to the area—even though many state politicians don’t believe in climate change. None of these strategies is bad in itself, but they all presume and rely upon more growth. Likewise, Ross interviews the developers pushing growth in the shape of large, eco-friendly communities in what currently remains desert, finding them more excited about designing green on a blank slate than doing the complex and less glamorous work of increasing density in the central city. Perhaps the economic crisis, which has caused development to grind to a near halt, may determine whether the city can go beyond these superficial green measures and move toward genuine sustainability. Bird on Fire feels in large part like an academic treatise, a trifle dry and carefully exhaustive. But Ross’s own opinions do surface. He does not believe in the notion of sustainable growth. True sustainability, he argues, consists of rejecting growth and—crucially— achieving social equality. Over and over he returns to the notion that you can’t buy your way out of an environmental hole with cool gadgets marketed to middle-class people. In a future Phoenix based on that approach, the wealthy will live in walled “eco-enclaves” while the hoi polloi are abandoned to deal with the ravages of climate change, pollution, and other legacies of environmental mismanagement. He fears that that way lies “eco-apartheid”—a coinage of former Obama administration
s p o t l i g h t
EMPIRE OF SHADOWS The Epic Story of Yellowstone By George Black, St. Martin’s, $35 COLUMNS OF BOILING WATER SHOOTING 100 FEET INTO THE AIR?
Underground explosions shaking the earth like distant artillery? Fish swimming in both directions in the same river, some bound for the Atlantic and others for the Pacific? For nineteenth-century pioneers, adventurers, and scientists, the valley of the upper Yellowstone was the most mysterious and mythladen corner of the western frontier, and the urge to explore it became an obsession. But before these men could reach their goal, the frontier had to be settled and “civilized,” and the hostile tribes that blocked the paths to the great volcanic caldera had to be brought to heel. In his latest book, OnEarth executive editor George Black tells the dramatic story of Yellowstone through the lives of the driven, ambitious, and often ruthless men who created the world’s first national park, like the former vigilante leader Nathaniel Pitt Langford, the park’s first superintendent, pictured here on the terraces of Mammoth Hot Springs by the great landscape photographer William Henry Jackson. Weaving together the grand themes of exploration, idealism, and violence, Empire of Shadows is a beautifully written reinterpretation of the nineteenth-century West that will forever change the way we think about one of America’s most iconic places.
green czar Van Jones. Ross hopes instead for “healthy pathways out of poverty,” such as community gardens and farms and green weatherization jobs. Although Ross does not pose it explicitly, a question hovers over the whole book: Is a huge city in the middle of the desert that has to import nearly ev-
erything just a terrible idea? Should Phoenix simply be allowed to crash and burn? If that happened, people would leave and resource use would shrink, perhaps even down to sustainable levels. But what would rise from the ashes? An empty ring of exclusive eco-suburbs? Or a smaller city where justice for
all, local food, and a dense urban core are surrounded by the bleaching remains of sprawling tract homes, their taps dry and their swimming pools slowly filling with sand? After reading Ross, either future sounds more plausible than the city’s current vision of growth without end. — EMMA MARRIS
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Dispatches news and views from the natural resources defense council
Still Endangered A federal court decision recognizes the threats posed by global warming.
The plight of the hungry grizzly Yellowstone bears get renewed protection as climate change threatens whitebark pine, a crucial food source
T
he grizzly bear may soon be joining its
polar bear cousin as a symbol of global warming’s destructive impact. This is not encouraging news, of course, but there is one significant glimmer of hope: the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit last November unanimously reasserted the animal’s status as an endangered species. The court recognized that the Yellowstone grizzly population, which has been on the endangered list since 1975, is newly threatened by the decline of a primary food source, the whitebark pine, which itself faces extinction because of a warming climate. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had pushed to remove the bears from the endangered list because their numbers had rebounded. But “it’s not just about numbers,” says NRDC research associate Janet Bar-
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wick. “There must also be proper habitat and plentiful food sources.” The Greater Yellowstone Coalition challenged the delisting in federal court, with NRDC providing critical background related to the dire condition of whitebark pine in an amicus brief. The rapid disappearance of this crucial food source, the brief argued, poses a clear threat to grizzlies, which consume the trees’ fatty, nutritious nuts. “The court agreed with us that Fish and Wildlife had not appropriately considered how much the loss of whitebark pine would affect the bear population,” says Sylvia Fallon, NRDC’s senior wildlife conservation scientist, who drafted the petition to list whitebark pine as endangered. Whitebark pine faces two dire threats: from the mountain pine beetle, which is surviving at higher elevations because of warmer temperatures, and from the deadly pathogen known as blister rust, which originated in Asia but came to the United States from Europe.
oppostie: Bob Smith/National Geographic stock; right: bloomberg contributor; top: Steve Jones
More than 80 percent of the tree’s population in the Greater Yellowstone area have been afflicted by these scourges to a point beyond recovery, according to Fallon. How to save the whitebark pine? Certain blister-rust resistant trees have been discovered and are being planted on affected landscapes. Volunteers from the Wyomingbased nonprofit TreeFight have been stapling small packets that release pheromones to any surviving pines; the pheromones falsely signal that a tree is already occupied by beetles, thereby preventing infestation. “We’re glad that there are some restoration efforts under way, but the real issue here is climate change, so that’s a tough one,” Fallon says. Whitebark pine nuts are one of several food sources for the grizzly bear, which is an omnivorous species. As the trees disappear, grizzlies must search for other food, often forcing them to lower elevations, where they are more likely to encounter humans, including hunters. As a result, grizzly mortality rates have already risen and could grow higher, particularly as the bears continue to move outside the confines of their core habitat in and around Yellowstone National Park. “We need to ensure the bears’ safety outside the park,” explains Whitney Leonard, an NRDC wildlife advocate in Montana, “because bears are roaming farther to make up for that lost food source.” “Whitebark pine is an important food source. And yet grizzlies are also highly adaptable,” says Andrew Wetzler, co-director of NRDC’s land and wildlife program. “If we don’t delist them and if we protect them from human conflict, there’s reason to believe they’ll recover.” The prospects for whitebark pine, however, remain bleaker. “If we don’t do anything to address global warming, it’s very hard to see a future for this tree,” Wetzler says.
— susan E. matthews
Unleaded World In the 1990s, NRDC set an
ambitious goal: eliminate the use of leaded gasoline in every country in the world, just as had been done in the United States. To accomplish its mission, in 2002 NRDC co-founded the Partnership for Clean Fuels and Vehicles with the United Nations Environment Programme and a group of governments, NGOs, and leaders in the auto and oil industries.
BEATING city hall Sheila Holt-Orsted
a fight for racial justice
The partnership advised countries on how to change their refinery practices and conducted on-the-ground testing of gasoline around the world to ensure progress and compliance. More than 185 countries have eliminated lead from gasoline, and the partnership believes the six remaining countries that still use leaded gasoline will switch to unleaded by — Amy Kraft the end of 2012.
Did You Know? You can defend the environment while receiving guaranteed payments for life with an NRDC Charitable Gift Annuity. Single Life Rates Age...................... Rate 63.........................4.5% 69.........................5.0% 73.........................5.5% 76.........................6.0% 81.........................7.0% 86.........................8.0% 90+......................9.0% For more information, contact Peter Meysenburg, NRDC’s gift planning officer, at (212) 727-4583 and pmeysenburg@nrdc.org
Natural Resources Defense Council 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011
www.nrdc.org/giftannuity
I
n her first meeting with an NRDC attorney, in 2007,
Sheila Holt-Orsted was asked if she had any documentation that could be of help in what ultimately became a groundbreaking environmental lawsuit. Luckily, she came prepared. “I had every paper I could muster,” recalls Holt-Orsted. “I opened up this suitcase, and he said, ‘Wow.’” After nearly 10 years of legal battles, Holt-Orsted has triumphed in one of the nation’s most blatant cases of environmental injustice. For years, she and her family endured grave health threats from toxic chemicals in their drinking water. Now a court has awarded them compensation for the damage they suffered. The gravity of Holt-Orsted’s situation began to dawn on her in 2003, when she returned home to Tennessee for Christmas to learn that her father had been diagnosed with prostate cancer. Within months, her mother was diagnosed with cervical polyps, and then she herself was diagnosed with breast cancer. Holt-Orsted soon discovered that her relatives were among several similarly affected families who lived on Eno Road in a historically black section of rural Dickson County. She also discovered that the well water her family had been drinking for decades was contaminated with trichloroethylene (TCE)—a toxic chemical that the federal government lists as a probable human carcinogen and that had seeped into their water from a city landfill adjacent to the family farm. Holt-Orsted eventually learned that other families in Dickson County had been warned about the well water contamination and given access to a municipal water supply—except those families had been told about the danger 10 years before her own family was switched to a municipal source. The main difference between the two groups? Race. Her family filed a civil rights suit with the help of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, a case that is still pending. But Holt-Orsted also reached out to NRDC. It was clear, explains attorney Michael Wall, who worked on the litigation, that the case had profound implications in the larger fight for environmental justice. In 2007, Holt-Orsted and NRDC filed a second suit to compel the city of Dickson, the county, and several corporate manufacturers to take responsibility for the cleanup and to compensate her family for the damage caused to their health. Now that a legal victory has been secured, NRDC plans to help monitor the cleanup process. “No one in Dickson County—or anywhere else, for that matter—should ever experience what happened to the Holt family,” Wall says. — S.E.M.
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TRUTH SQUAD
About Those Antibiotics in Your Meat
longstanding plan to limit the use of antibiotics fed to livestock to speed up weight gain and to compensate for crowded, unsanitary conditions. The Federal Register notice, excerpted below, outlines the reasons for the agency’s decision. OnEarth asked Avinash Kar, NRDC’s health program attorney, to fact-check the FDA’s claims.
the 1977 withdrawing s i A D F , e other m At this ti engaging in s i A D F ) 1 ( se: eveloped NOOHs becau trategies d s y r o t a l u g OHs with ongoing re the 1977 NO f o n o i t a c i fety ubl ial food sa since the p b o r c i m g n i address s to respect to date the NOOH up d ul wo A FD poliation, and issues; (2) m r o f n i , a t rent da to move reflect cur it decides , e r u t u f e eed th FDA would n cies if, in ) 3 ( … l a w a r h withd edings… forward wit rawal proce d h t i w y n a ithze to prioriti es to seek w d i c ea e d t i , 1977 B a d i d uture f e h e t h t g n n i i w a , r f i s withd issue hough FDA i drawal… Alt d about the e n r e c n o c s remain ’s action NOOHs, FDA ance. Today t s i s e r l a i ob at FDA of antimicr s a sign th a d e t e r p r e be int intends should not ncerns… FDA o c y t e f a s as on the no longer h ts for now r o f f e s t i d the to focus y reform an r a t n u l o v r o mipotential f use of anti s u o i c i d u j f the ic health. promotion o est of publ r e t n i e h t crobials in t
No gh n e ou
*The science showing
*Notices of Opportunity
for a Hearing (NOOH) are the documents that contain the FDA’s findings that the use of penicillin and most tetracyclines in the feed of healthy animals was “not shown to be safe” for human health since it contributes to the rise of antibiotic resistance.
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*This refers to
voluntary strategies discussed by the FDA—that is, selfpolicing by the industry. The agency is not imposing any regulations at all. If it were, that would mean moving forward on the NOOHs, not withdrawing them.
the danger of using low doses of antibiotics in animal feed for healthy animals has only gotten stronger. Leading medical and public health groups, including the CDC and the American Medical Association, agree that such use poses a risk to human health.
*The evidence shows
reason for alarm, yet the FDA is not requiring any reduction of antibiotic use. Eighty percent of antibiotics sold in the United States are for use in livestock, and the use of one antibiotic can lead to resistance to others. Antibiotic resistance can spread from livestock facilities through the meat produced there, through workers who come into contact with the animals, and through environmental pathways such as nearby waterways.
Alien Invasion The Great Lakes are under
attack. Ships carry invasive species, such as zebra mussels and round gobies, in their ballast water, then typically discharge this creature-laden water in the ports where they dock. The disposal of ballast water was not regulated under the Clean Water Act until 2008; the EPA had assumed it posed no significant environmental threat. But the ecological price has been very real, as these invaders threaten native animals and plants, cause structural damage, and degrade the overall health of the ecosystem. Repairing and managing this damage has cost the eight states bordering the Great Lakes more than $1 billion over the past five years. Now, as the result of a lawsuit brought by NRDC and its partners, the EPA has proposed a new national rule that would limit the amount of ballast water commercial vessels can dump. The standards would also require ships to install systems that filter or disinfect ballast water before it is released into the water. “Requiring vessels to comply with a set of discharge standards is a paradigm shift in how the federal government has addressed the economic and environmental harm associated with invasive species,” says Thom Cmar, an attorney for NRDC. Although Cmar considers the standards too lax, he believes they represent “a step forward from where we are now. And we expect over time that they will — A.K. get stronger.”
above: ted kinsman/photo researchers inc.; opposite right: Scott Cunningham/NBAE/Getty Images
O
n December 22, 2011, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration withdrew its
NRDC in the NEWS “Jake Schmidt of the U.S.-based Natural
“Bob McEnaney, Land policy analyst
Resources Defense Council said: ‘This report should be a wake-up call to those that believe that climate change is some distant issue that might impact someone else. The report documents that extreme weather is happening now and that global warming will bring very dangerous events in the future....This is a window into the future if our political response doesn’t change quickly.’” —From “IPCC Expected to Confirm Link Between Climate Change and Extreme Weather,” Guardian, November 17, 2011
for the Natural Resources Defense Council, said that uranium mining in northern Arizona had led to landscape scarring and water contamination. ‘The history of uranium mining in the region has not been pretty,’ he said. ‘A decision that would lead to protecting the Grand Canyon and the Colorado River is a no-brainer.’” —From “White House to Extend Ban on Uranium Mining in Grand Canyon,” Wall Street Journal, January 8, 2012
“‘Clean air will be the biggest environmental accomplishment of the Obama administration, and the forthcoming mercury rule will be the crowning achievement of an already strong clean-air résumé,’ said John Walke, director of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s clean air program.” —From “EPA Set to Impose Tough Mercury Limit at Power Plants,” Los Angeles Times, December 15, 2011
show us your nature
“‘President Obama put the health and safety of the American people and our air, lands and water—our national interest—above the interests of the oil industry,’ asserted Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council. ‘His decision represents a triumph of truth over Big Oil’s bullying tactics and its disinformation campaign with wildly exaggerated jobs claims.’” —From “Obama Administration Denies Permit for Keystone XL Pipeline,” New American, January 19, 2012
Submit your photos at onearth.org/photocontest
PEACE OUT! This chilled-out gray tree frog (Hyla versicolor), a species native to the eastern United States and commonly found in swampy environs, appears unconcerned as photographer Winky Vivas approaches with his Canon PowerShot G10. The frog is hanging out on a branch at the Harrison Lake National Fish Hatchery in Charles City County, Virginia, and, with its peace-sign fingers, may be encouraging nearby observers to relax a bit themselves.
Team Green Could America’s sports
teams change the way we think about sustainability? That’s the idea behind the Green Sports Alliance, an organization co-founded in March 2011 by NRDC and representatives from six professional sports leagues to rally teams, arenas, corporate sponsors, and fans to adopt pro-environmental practices on and off the field. The alliance now includes 13 leagues and more than 40 teams and venues. Teams from Major League Baseball, the National Hockey League, and the National Basketball Association have worked with NRDC and the EPA to monitor energy and water use, waste generation, recycling, and paper procurement. Eleven LEED-certified facilities have been developed, including Sun Life Stadium in Miami, the first LEED Silver retractable-dome stadium, which is due to open this year. The impact of the U.S. sports industry is huge, culturally and economically, with a supply chain that touches industries from paper and food to chemicals and textiles, says Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist at NRDC who helped launch the campaign. “We’re trying to inspire a cultural shift among the hundreds of millions of people who regularly pay attention to sports and get them to think favorably about environmentalism.” —A.K.
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fieldwork
who we are
what we do
him in jail, and as word spread about his incarceration, Malik’s mother, a patent attorney, was demoted to the position of secretary. “We were basically dissidents— people on the wrong side of the tracks politically,” Malik says. In 1984, with no indication that the decade’s end would bring democracy, Malik, then 18, and his 23-year-old brother fled by
favored. During trips kayaking above the Arctic Circle in Canada and hiking through remote parts of Africa and Greenland, Malik’s passion for the environment grew deeper. When the financial crisis hit in 2008, Malik took the opportunity to step back and reexamine his life. “I was burned out,” he admits. It wasn’t long before he spotted
Peter Malik’s Journey
A refugee from the Iron Curtain and Wall St. funnels capital toward a new future.
Global investments It takes a seasoned capitalist to understand the power of money to do good in the world
P
by Alyssa noel
eter Malik was just a child when he
became aware that acid rain was destroying the forest surrounding his family’s cabin two hours north of Prague, deep in the mountains of what was then Czechoslovakia. “The country was a disaster zone,” recalls Malik, now director of NRDC’s Center for Market Innovation. “The Communist government was going after cheap energy to feed its highly inefficient and declining military-industrial complex. They were strip-mining; there were coal-burning power plants everywhere. They moved entire towns to dig for the stuff. My parents were vocal about their opposition to the pollution, so I knew I was against it, even as a kid.” As devastating as the destruction was, Malik and his family had more pressing issues to confront. His father’s political activism landed
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foot, carrying nothing but small backpacks, to a refugee camp in Austria—a 15-hour trek through thick forest. In 1985 the brothers were allowed to emigrate as political refugees to the United States and eventually landed in Chicago. Malik earned a bachelor’s degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and then attended Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. Unsure of his ultimate career path, he headed to New York to “check out” Wall Street. “I thought it was the immigrant’s ultimate coming of age,” he explains, “to wear a suit and have an office at 60 Wall Street at J.P. Morgan.” After two years there, he moved to London to work as an investment banker for Credit Suisse, where he led a 20-person team that connected governments and private enterprise in emerging economies to global investors. When he took time off, Malik was perhaps one of the few people in his business to leave his Blackberry behind—though it’s doubtful he would have gotten reception anyway in the far-flung locales he
a job opening at NRDC’s Center for Market Innovation, whose mandate to connect the business world with the environmental community seemed tailor-made for him. During the past three years, CMI, with Malik at the helm, has made groundbreaking progress on several projects. One example: the center, which was founded with the support of NRDC trustee Shelly Malkin and her husband, Tony Malkin, has been working with the City of Philadelphia on a plan to divert rainwater away from an overtaxed, often overflowing sewer system. Instead, the water will gradually be absorbed into the ground through new green infrastructure such as permeable surfaces, gardens, and trees. “The businesses that appear, at first, to be losers—shopping malls, car dealerships—gain incentives to install this green infrastructure,” Malik says. “They actually come out of it as winners financially.” “Money, for better or worse, is the main motivator in the world as we know it,” Malik says, “so we try to use money as a powerful motivator for the right ends.”
PHOTOGRAPH FOR ONEARTH BY Mike McGregor
As devastating as the environmental destruction was, Malik’s family had more pressing issues. His father’s politics had landed him in jail. “We were basically dissidents.”
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full circle Meredith Taylor sees firsthand how global climate change has affected the American West. Taylor, a longtime NRDC member, is a retired wilderness outfitter who led trips into Yellowstone National Park and the surrounding area for three decades. “The landscape is changing right before our eyes,” she says. “We can see the glaciers melting and forests dying from insects, disease, and drought.” Working alongside NRDC senior wildlife advocate Louisa Willcox in Montana for many years, Taylor realized that saving the region’s wolves and grizzlies was critical to making the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem whole again. “NRDC has risen to the top of the conservation groups I see making a difference in the West—and really all over the world—protecting our wildlife and wildlands and fighting global warming,” she says. Now that Taylor and her husband, Tory, are easing into retirement and beginning to think about their legacy, they’ve decided to include NRDC in their will. Says Taylor: “We decided to complete the circle we started when we first became NRDC members, so our environmental commitment will live on through NRDC’s work.” 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.
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Spring 2012
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funny with his feet: not ha-ha funny, but disturbing funny. Although it seems impossible for this to be so, the elephant appears a camera tour, with our guide, Andreas. Dennis and I have been seeing elephants for much of the now to be trying to shrink, almost crouch, and his feet are coming down day: nearby boreholes have helped nurture wildlife, softer and sneakier, like those of a cat approaching a thicket of grass in but can also sometimes concentrate the animals which a mouse or vole is hiding. It’s ridiculous: this six-ton beast is out too close together. It’s a delicate tampering. We in the broad middle of the day, out in the middle of the sand river, bigger spy an old bull elephant so large it seems he could somehow change than life—does he think we don’t see him?—and yet the secret of his blood is betrayed, he does have damage the world: shoving aside huge masses on his mind, and as he prepares to close of earth, shifting the flow and gravity that final distance, his body cannot help of things, rearranging constellations; but obey the old habits and instincts of fashioning new life, and new stories, countless other stalks. The elephant out of dust and clay. knows there is no tall grass between The old elephant beholds us and, him and his quarry, this time, but the unlike the others, he displays no susparts of his body that are wired to both pension of judgment, no wait-and-see his memory and his intent do not care. immobility; from the very beginning, It’s just a little thing, this crouching he evinces a hostility, if not aggression, and sneak-footing, but the elephant is that is smoldering. Andreas pauses, much closer now, almost close enough knowing that we will want photos, but that, should he choose suddenly to looks stricken and gestures toward the charge, he might be upon us before we elephant’s ears, both of which are flapcan act—but he will not find Andreas ping slowly, steadily, like the wings of napping, and we are already lurching the largest butterfly in the world. One of forward, and the elephant stops his apthe ears has a neatly drilled bullet hole proach as soon as we drive off. For long in it, perhaps from yesterday, or perhaps moments afterward, the linings of our from half a century ago, we don’t know. hearts tingle and sizzle with the delightSix gemsbok surround the elephant ful electrified cleanliness of survival. like courtiers—Andreas has told us that Giraffes, ostriches, and baboons these oryx follow the elephants from stride and trot and scurry across the one acacia to the next, to eat the seeds dry riverbed before us, coming and gothat the elephants knock from the trees His feet are coming down ing at cross-purposes. It is of course the while browsing (a high wind will also softer and sneakier, like those of a borehole that has concentrated them in stir the gemsbok into foraging, traveling cat approaching a thicket of grass in such density. They remind me of pafrom one tree to the next for this same trons at a bar awaiting happy hour. We purpose, and I have the thought that which a mouse or vole is hiding have reached the last borehole; from the elephant is a kind of wind, made visible)—and the elephant leaves the gemsbok then and begins advancing here on out, it is just heat and sand and light. The river itself disappears upon us, walking carefully, deliberately, but with his ears still flapping, farther underground, so that even the bankside vegetation thins and then and Andreas lets out on the clutch, eases forward the same distance, vanishes, as does the multitude of life that we’ve been witnessing thus far. We turn around and head back, passing many of the same lingering then stops again while Dennis’s camera shutters and clicks. As if hypnotizing us, the elephant continues to approach, and we individuals (the old sneaky-footed elephant is gone, fortunately), and recognize that even though he’s trying to appear casual, he is still we return to our comfortable lives, where nothing—and certainly not traveling in a direct line toward us, and that despite the appearance the most necessary thing, water—is yet in short supply. of ambling, the distance is closing, and Andreas grows even more agitated as Dennis fiddles with his camera. Watching through the Rick Bass is a contributing editor to OnEarth. His most recent book is In My binoculars, I can see that now the elephant is doing something Home There Is No More Sorrow: Ten Days in Rwanda.
6 4 onearth
spring 2012
illustration by chris koehler
amibia. Driving down a sand river,
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