OnEarth Spring 2010

A CONVERSATION WITH OBAMA’S CLIMATE CZ AR

Published by the Natural Resources Defense Council

red, white and green An oil-rich, conservative stronghold discovers a lucrative energy future

Inside Honda’s Race to the Future How to Wage War on Food Waste New York’s Urban Wilderness Revealed

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contents

Onearth magazine

volume 32 number 1 spring 2010

FEATU R E S

24 Driven

by Craig Canine

Honda’s Japanese founder liked to talk about the “Three Joys” of making cars. Joy? In the auto industry? Yes, if fleetwide fuel efficiency has been part of your corporate DNA for 25 years.

dep a r t m ents cover story

38

A new way to pay for home improvements can save big bucks and the planet, too. Also, heirloom apples to the rescue, empty cages in zoos, and more.

Q&A Insisting on the need for

32 True Confessions

comprehensive energy legislation, White House climate czar Carol Browner brings to mind an old slogan: it’s the economy, stupid.

Of a Citizen Scientist

by Sharman Apt Russell

We know so much about the natural world, and yet so little.

Immerse yourself in the life of one obscure insect and you can end up knowing more about it than anyone else on earth.

22 Living Green

by Laura Wright The moldering contents of one woman’s fridge are a small part of the 100 billion pounds of food we throw away every year. Can we end our addiction to excess?

46 Water’s Edge Photographers Diane Cook and Len Jenshel encourage us to meditate on the mysteries of the New York City waterfront.

With text by Robert Sullivan.

poet ry

12 And Then Some

by Elton Glaser

cover flags: hola images/corbis, joseph sohm/corbis

57 Stars, Trainwhistles, Weeds

by Reg Saner

54 reviews For rancher Susan Hansen, a wind farm is more profitable than raising cattle—and siting the turbines on private property relieves some of the pressure on our fragile public lands.

Renewable Energy Catches On in Red America

by Michael Behar

could find. But it’s fallen in love with wind and solar power—for strictly fiscal reasons. If this revolution

visit onearth.org

Check out our expanded coverage of books, exhibitions, films, and other cultural offerings on the Web at onearth.org/department/reviews

Why do Americans treat science as a sideshow in the culture wars? David Berreby reviews The Essential Engineer. Plus, what we love about trees, and the tangled ethics of genetic research.

64 open space

by Kim Tingley Staring into the eyes of a 14-foot alligator in Florida, a writer gets in touch with her inner reptile.

Kern County, California, with an economy driven by oil and the military, is as conservative a place as you

onearth online

8 From the Editor 12 Letters 15 FRONTLINES

helps green the planet, well, that’s icing on the cake.

This page and cover: Photographs by Amanda Friedman; cover photo-illustration by OnEarth Magazine

i ns i de n r dc

10 view from nrdc

by Frances Beinecke

58 dispatches A victory against dirty coal in Ohio, Emmylou Harris, and more.

sp r i n g 2 0 1 0

onearth 1

onearth A publication of the

natural resources defense council Editor-in-Chief Managing Editor articles Editor Senior Editor Editorial Assistant Interns

douglas S. barasch Janet gold george black laura wright Jennifer M. Sta. Ines Crystal Gammon, lindsey konkel

Art Director gail ghezzi Photo Editor lila garnett Associate Art Director irene huang Poetry Editor Copy Editors Contributing Editors

Brian swann David gunderson, Elise Mar ton rick bass, Michael behar, alan burdick, craig canine, tim folger, edward hoagland, sharon levy, bill Mckibben, mary oliver, elizabeth royte, alex shoumatoff, bruce stutz

Online Editors scott dodd, Laura Wright Community Editor Ben Jervey Online Production William Tam creative consultant

J.-C. Suarès

Special Projects francesca koe Advertising Director publisher Deputy Publisher Editorial Board

Ex Officio

Founder

Larry Guerra phil gutis david parker wendy gordon, Chair Rober t Bourque, Chris Calwell, anna scott car ter, susan caseylefkowitz, nathanael greene, henry henderson, roland hwang, Jonathan Z. Larsen, Josephine A. Merck, cullen murphy, david pettit, lisa suatoni, Frederick A. Terry Jr. Frances Beinecke, peter lehner, linda lopez, Jack Murray, Patricia F. Sullivan, Wesley P. Warren John H. Adams

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advertising : 212-727-4577 or adsales@onearth.org Editorial: 212-727-4412 or onearth@nrdc.org Editorial Pur pose

onearth is a quarterly magazine of thought and opinion on the environment. It is open to

diverse points of view; the opinions expressed by contributors and the editors are their own and not necessarily those of NRDC.

About NRDC

NRDC is a national nonprofit organization with 1.3 million members and online activists, and a staff of lawyers, scientists, and other environmental specialists. NRDC’s mission is to safeguard the earth: its people, its plants and animals, and the natural systems on which all life depends.

NRDC Offices 40 West 20th St. New York, NY 10011 212-727-2700

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onearth (issn 1537-4246) (volume 32, number 1) is published quarterly by the Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 40 West 20th St., New York, NY 10011 and printed by The Lane Press, South Burlington, Vermont. Newsstand circulation through Disticor Magazine Distribution Services; info@disticor. com. Copyright 2010 by the Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Periodical postage paid at New York and at additional mailing offices. NRDC Membership dues $15 annually. onearth is available to all members of NRDC upon request. Library subscription $8, one year; $15, two years; $22, three years. Single copies $5. To e-mail a change of address: nrdcinfo@nrdc.org. postmaster: Send address changes to onearth, 40 West 20th St., New York, NY 10011.

Companies today can’t ignore their environmental footprint.

Investors can’t ignore the opportunities that creates.

The Pax World Global Green Fund (PGRNX) invests in leading clean-tech companies around the world that address critical environmental problems. Using a unique Sustainable Investing methodology that combines rigorous financial analysis with equally rigorous environmental, social and governance (ESG) analysis, the Fund invests in such areas as alternative energy and energy efficiency, water treatment and pollution control and waste and resource management. While there’s nothing to be gained from environmental problems, we think there’s plenty to be gained from correcting them.

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Before investing in a fund, you should carefully consider the fund’s investment objectives, risks, charges and expenses. For this and other important information about the fund, please obtain a fund prospectus by calling 800.767.1729. Please read it carefully before investing. An investment in the funds involves risks, including loss of principal. Pax World Funds’ sustainable investing policies may inhibit the funds’ ability to participate in certain attractive investment opportunities. Distributed by: ALPS Distributors, Inc. Member FINRA (10/10)

Spring releases from New Society Publishers From Container to Kitchen

Energy-Wise Landscape Design

Growing Fruits and Vegetables in Pots D.J. Herda

A New Approach for your Home and Garden Sue Reed

The complete guide to growing food in the “no-yard” garden. …an invaluable guide filled with fun facts and useful tips.

—Don Bacue, former executive editor, International Features Syndicate

Save money and energy while adding natural beauty to your home.

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—Leslie Jones Sauer, author, The Once and Future Forest

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Serious Microhydro Water Power Solutions from the Experts Scott Davis From water to wire – harnessing the energy of running water

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Wind Power Basics

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A Green Energy Guide Dan Chiras

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Pathways to a Resilient Society Andres R. Edwards …thoroughly researched, deeply contemplated, and yet eminently practical.

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On Gandhi's Path

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Bob Swann's Work for Peace and Community Economics Stephanie Mills One of the great heroes of the 20th century decentralist movement, Bob Swann here gets the careful, serious, and may I say loving, treatment he deserves.

— Kirkpatrick Sale, co-founder, E.F. Schumacher Society

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Call 800-567-6772 for a free catalog, or visit us online at www.newsociety.com

onearth.org 4W

E B

volume 32

E X C L U S I V E S

number 1

spring 2010

visions OF NEW YORK

onearth.org/department/web-exclusives

WATCH AND LISTEN AS

husband-and-wife team Diane Cook and Len Jenshel talk about their stunning photographs of the New York City waterfront, which are accompanied by Robert Sullivan’s essay in this issue of OnEarth [see p. 46]: onearth.org/article/ waters-edge

let your voice be heard what’s bugging you?

4Citizen Scientists: The Series

You don’t need a white lab coat or a fancy degree to help scientists study the natural world. In an ongoing series, OnEarth looks at regular folks who are examining the impact of climate change on birds in their own backyards, testing for oil spills on the Bronx River in New York City, and much more. Tell us your story and find out how you can get involved: onearth.org/citizenscience

4Fighting the “Missile With Fins”

An invasive species with a voracious appetite and a knack for knocking people out of boats threatens to torpedo the Great Lakes’ fragile ecosystem. Now the Asian carp has entire states squabbling in court, prompting President Obama to summon Midwest governors to a White House summit. Follow the latest developments: onearth.org/asiancarp

4Philly Tries to Clean Up Its Act

If you live in a big city, every time it rains there’s a good chance that raw sewage spills out of overflow pipes and into your drinking water supply. Philadelphia has an innovative plan to fix that with more parks, trees, and community gardens. Now the city needs the feds to just say yes. So what’s their problem? onearth.org/article/phillywater

O U R

B L O G S

Osha Gray Davidson4

Some 5,000 sea turtles were found in a coma-like state off Florida this winter.

And that’s not their worst problem, writes Davidson. He also test drives the allelectric Nissan Leaf: onearth.org/author/odavidson

show us your nature Top readers’ photos

take the spotlight on our Web site. Share your great nature shots with us, and our editors will choose one to publish in our next issue [see p. 61]. To enter, visit: onearth.org/photocontest

onearth.org/blog Emily Gertz

Scott Dodd

After covering the Copenhagen climate talks, Gertz turns her sights to nuclear waste, the changing chemistry of the oceans, and disturbing attacks on environmental journalists worldwide: onearth.org/author/ejgertz

Our online news editor keeps readers up-to-date on breaking news about important stories covered in OnEarth, from drugs in our drinking water to highspeed rail to the Parkinson’sand-pesticides link: onearth.org/author/scott-dodd

spring 2010

onearth 5

above: Phil augustavo/istockphoto

4O N

Whether it’s something happening in your own backyard or halfway around the world, if you care about our planet, share your concerns and hopes by blogging with us: onearth.org/my-onearth/ citizen-journalism

contributors AMANDA FRIEDMAN (“Renewable Energy Catches On in Red America,” p. 38) is a Detroit native who still shoots real film with a medium- and large-format camera. “I still think it looks better than digital,” she says. Her photographs have appeared in the London Sunday Telegraph, Newsweek, GQ, Interview, and other publications. matthew holmes (“True Confessions of a Citizen Scientist,” p. 32), who lives in northern California, has been an illustrator for more than 20 years.

His work has been featured in such publications as Texas Monthly and Los Angeles magazine. He enjoys bugs of all types, except for spiders, which he prefers to step on.

sharman apt russell (“True Confessions of a Citizen Scientist,” p. 32) is an awardwinning nature and science writer whose most recent book is Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist (Basic Books). She teaches creative writing at Western New Mexico University in Silver City and Antioch University in Los Angeles. 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.

6 onearth

fall 2 0 0 8

friedman: Brian Stevens; Sullivan: Myrna gcopaleen

robert sullivan (“Water’s Edge,” p. 46) is the author of numerous books, including Rats (Granta Books) and The Thoreau You Don’t Know (HarperCollins).

A contributing editor at Vogue and frequent contributor to the New Yorker, he is at work on a book about the Revolutionary War. He lives in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York.

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editor’s letter

R

WE imagine a new landscape

ealities even more fundamental than ideology and politics

Douglas S. barasch

8 onearth

spring 2010

jeff Weiner

undergird American life: common sense and making an honest buck. Our current issue offers two superb examples. In our cover story, contributing editor Michael Behar takes us to a conservative redoubt in central California, where pumping oil and serving the military-industrial complex have for decades formed the foundation of the economy. But now, Kern County’s planners, developers, and landowners are constructing a new future built on solar and wind power and other forms of renewable energy—all driven by the pure, irresistible economic logic of these emerging technologies. County planner Lorelei Oviatt assists energy companies in placing their new projects on private, marginal land—for instance, arid, unproductive agricultural fields—in order to preserve public open spaces that citizens value for wildlife and solace. Behar observes Oviatt as she buoyantly navigates the messiness of democracy, capitalism, and property rights. Her success in consummating deals and breaking ground on new projects suggests a post-partisan pursuit of profit and public good simultaneously—a happy convergence of local self-interest and global self-preservation.

We dispatched another contributing editor, Craig Canine (our resident gearhead), to profile a leading Japanese car company. Not the one much in the news lately for its quality-control problems. Rather, a quieter company that is less in the public eye but that may have done more than any other enterprise in the world to change the automotive landscape. Many, if not most, car experts see Honda as the supreme green vehicle manufacturer. The company has consistently been preeminent in fleetwide fuel efficiency, meaning that it earns kudos—and, by the way, healthy profits—not with a single eco-glamorous hybrid but across its entire line of cars. Canine describes a fascinating corporate culture that has remained true to its own idiosyncratic philosophy and resisted most of the American industry’s self-destructive delusions. At Honda’s U.S. headquarters and at the big LA Auto Show, Canine spoke to the company’s top brass and brainiac engineers for a glimpse of our automotive future. Hybrids? Plug-in electrics? Engines powered by hydrogen fuel cells? Canine reads the tea leaves.

Finally, I direct your attention to two pieces simply because of the sheer pleasure they offer. Sharman Apt Russell has given us a funny, true account of her attempt to become the world’s leading expert on a common but remarkable beetle in her own backyard. We have also published a stunning portfolio by the photographers Diane Cook and Len Jenshel, who have spent almost a decade chronicling the often elusive, watery edges of New York City. Robert Sullivan has written an accompanying essay that guides readers through the history, geography, and significance of this border terrain. Taken together, all these stories help redefine our own conceptual borders—natural/man-made, conservative/progressive, professional/amateur—and beckon us to forge a better if less familiar path forward.

view from NRDC

W

hen President Obama urged the Senate to pass

comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation in his State of the Union Address, one thing really caught the attention of Capitol Hill staffers: it was the only instance in which the president vowed personally to help Congress achieve a specific goal. “I am grateful to the House for passing such a bill last year,” he said. “And this year I’m eager to help advance the bipartisan effort in the Senate.”

The president’s personal commitment matters. In Copenhagen, as climate negotiations neared collapse, he arrived on the scene and immediately rolled up his sleeves. When China sent a lower-level official to a key meeting, Obama himself tracked down Premier Wen Jiabao. At one point during the fragile talks, the president took out his pen and started drafting new text. In the end, he helped persuade the roughly 30 nations responsible for 90 percent of the world’s carbon emissions to sign on to the Copenhagen Accord, an agreement that has already prompted China, India, Brazil, and other major polluters to report their efforts to address climate change in a transparent, international registry.

Clearly, President Obama is ready to get to work. Now the rest of us must do the same: we need to help build bipartisan support for a comprehensive approach to clean energy and climate legislation.

After Senate Democrats lost their filibuster-proof 60 votes in January, some political analysts said the climate bill was dead. Those forecasts were misguided. We have always known that climate legislation needs bipartisan support to succeed. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, Democratic Senator John Kerry, and Senator Joe Lieberman, an independent, have proposed a policy framework for building such support. Actually securing those votes will be a tough fight: our senators need to know that Americans from all walks of life believe that creating clean energy jobs and fighting global warming are top priorities.

Clean energy and climate legislation will not succeed without you. Last December, President Obama summoned me and a group of other environmental leaders and business executives to the White House. The president told us that climate solutions were a top priority for him, but added, “I can’t do this alone. I can’t do it unless you help me build the case for action.”

So I’m passing on the word: help us build the case for action. Tell your senators that you support clean energy and climate legislation.

frances beinecke, President

1 0 onearth

spring 2 0 1 0

nrdc in the news “ ‘there’s increasing concern that if we don’t get it together in the U.S., we will lose the clean-energy markets and jobs and growth that come with [a carbon cap],’ says David Doniger, policy director at NRDC’s climate center.”

—From “Climate Accord Suggests a Global Will, if Not a Way,” time.com, February 2, 2010

“this star studded video from NRDC urging the Senate to act on clean energy legislation is brilliant. Do what Dr. Cornell West says and ‘Tweet that.’ ” [To view, visit thisisourmoment.org] —From “Best PSA Ever,” RollingStone.com, January 29, 2010

“a complete energy retrofit...could slice a home’s energy consumption in half, according to Lane Burt, manager of building energy policy at NRDC. ‘It’s a win-win-win,’ said Burt. ‘It creates jobs, it saves energy, and it saves consumers money.’ ” —From “When a Home Energy Audit Pays,” CNNMoney.com, January 7, 2010

“ ‘the real sweet spot will be if China’s e-bike explosion leads to the development of electric cars,’ said Alex Wang of NRDC. ‘China is probably better positioned to make this leap than any other country in the world.’ ” —From “Putting the Brakes on Pedal Power,” Washington Post, December 15, 2009

Matt Greenslade/photo-nyc.com

we can do this: a clean energy and climate bill

backtalk

40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011

my kind of town In the quest for sustainable

development, many U.S. metropolitan regions face obstacles similar to those in Chicago’s seven counties. I hope your article “Redrawing the American City,”

by Laura Wright (Winter 2010), is correct that our approach could be a national model for how regions can guide development and infrastructure decisions. OnEarth helped reinforce our belief that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution to how communities can meet these challenges. But the many needs they have in common—for example, efficient infrastructure that contributes to economic development and resource conservation while letting people live nearer to where they work—are prompting communities to work together toward a more prosperous and sustainable region. Cooperation at the local, regional, and state levels is essential for comprehensive planning to succeed, but federal programs are also key to promoting comprehensive planning in metropolitan regions from coast to coast, helping the United States compete more effectively for jobs in a global economy.

Residents are remarkably civic minded. Good urban design fosters that sense of community. posted online by Anonymous Someone forgot to tell Wright that the unofficial motto of Chicago is “Where’s mine?” While Chicago and other large cities, such as Cleveland and Detroit, have potential for infill to reduce urban sprawl, Chicago is hampered by government (city, county, and state) that is rife with corruption and pay-to-play politics. posted online by Babs

NEW YORK, NEW YORK “How Green Is My City” (Winter 2010), Douglas Rushkoff’s review of Green Metropolis by David Owen, doesn’t adequately take into account the life support of cities. New York City’s water comes from 125 miles away in the Catskills; its food from Kansas,

onearth@nrdc.org

Florida, and the distant ocean; its energy from Appalachia, the Mideast, and subarctic Canada.

Its garbage cruises the world like a ghost ship. And while they live in apartments and ride the subway, affluent New Yorkers do have second homes in Vermont and do vacation in Tuscany. All of these things increase Manhattan’s ecological footprint far beyond its 23 square miles. Accounting for indirect effects and for total consumption is a fairer—and necessary—basis for urban/suburban/ rural comparisons.

—ROBERT HERENDEEN

Burlington, Vermont

write to us

Got an opinion? Send in your thoughts by pen or by keyboard. Visit us on the Web at onearth.org. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.

And Then Some Slow moon on a windy night, and May Rising in a hormone harmony,

—RANDALL BLANKENHORN

Executive Director Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning Chicago, Illinois

In a wave of snakes sliding out from Their small warm holes, tongues sniffing the dark.

In some unseen tree, a bird opens up Its artery of song, soundtrack to the season.

1 2 onearth

s p ring 2 0 1 0

abound in our community: we have not one but two Metra lines running into Chicago. Access to cheap and reliable public transit helps people make the shift away from cars. Finally, one of our best assets is a true sense of community: neighbors know each other and look out for each other.

Spring’s on a binge, wild and primitive As cousins from a land of hills and hollers And hog lard for the elderberry pie.

Juiced with sap, the new air pours Over me like sour mash on cracked ice.

I sip and sigh and settle in.

—By Elton Glaser

illustration by blair thornley

As a resident of Blue Island, south of downtown Chicago, I can vouch for its easy walkability and bikeability. I put more miles on my bicycle than on my car each year, mostly because I can actually get to grocery stores, schools, restaurants, shops, and local entertainment by bike. Transit options

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When you establish a Charitable Gift Annuity with NRDC, you help protect our environment now, and for decades to come.

A Charitable Gift Annuity gives you: • Guaranteed payments for life that NEVER CHANGE • An immediate charitable tax deduction and other tax benefits You can contribute to an NRDC Charitable Gift Annuity today using cash, stock or mutual funds.

secure your assets and protect the environment through an NRDC Charitable Gift Annuity SINGLE LIFE RATES AGE RATE 60 ...........................................5.0% 65 ............................................ 5.3% 70 ............................................ 5.7% 75 ............................................6.3% 80 ............................................7.1% 85 ............................................ 8.1% 90+ ..........................................9.5% For more information, with no obligation, please contact: Peter Meysenburg, Gift Planning Officer NRDC 40 W. 20th Street New York, NY 10011 212-727-4583 or legacygifts@nrdc.org www.nrdc.org/giftplanning

Spring 2010

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

Canada’s Toxic Mess

home energy makeover

illustration by Michael Morgenstern

Efficiency improvements can save property owners money and reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Now there’s a painless way to pay for those fixes.

R

by josephine hearn

ich Manning is crawling through an attic, flashlight in hand.

“See this?” he says, pointing a beam of light at a gap in the insulation. “They’re losing a ton of money with all the heat coming out of here.” Manning is conducting an energy audit, measuring how and where heat escapes from the house and making recommendations for more insulation, caulking, and weather stripping or for highefficiency heating and cooling systems, all of which reduce energy consumption, bring down utility bills, and curb greenhouse gas emissions.

Bill Broglie, the home’s owner, and his golden retriever, Meatball, listen as Manning explains his findings.

“You’ll need a foot more insulation up there,” he says. The good news: it may cost Broglie nothing.

The energy audit is part of the Long Island Green Homes program, an innovative year-old project in Babylon, New York, that offers low-interest financing for home energy retrofits. The town covers the cost of the work, and the homeowner simply agrees to pay it back over time in monthly installments. The josephine hearn is a science writer based in New York City. Her last assignment for the magazine was on invasive species.

Tar sands production in Alberta, Canada, has shot up considerably in recent years, from 482,000 barrels a day in 1995 to 1.3 million barrels a day in 2008, destroying bird habitat and leaving barren landscapes along the way.

Some 205 square miles have been cleared or disturbed by mining operations, and tailing ponds cover more than 50 square miles.

Pollution from tar sands development is monitored by an industry-and-government collaborative known as the Regional Aquatic Monitoring Program, or RAMP, which tests the Athabasca River and other waterways for the presence of toxic chemicals contained in bitumen—the semisolid form of oil that is extracted from the sands.

OnEarth first reported on the effects of tar-sands mining in 2007 (“Canada’s Highway to Hell,” by Andrew Nikiforuk), and in December, a group of researchers led by David Schindler of the University of Alberta published a study that found RAMP’s estimates to be much too low. The molecules they detected indicate that some of the pollution clearly came from refineries, not from natural seeps.

“The concentrations we found in the river are within the range known to be toxic to fish embryos,” Schindler says.

—naomi lubick

Spring 2010

onearth 1 5

1 6 onearth

Spring 2010

“It’s been tough to convince building owners to reduce their carbon footprint,” says Greg Hale, a financial policy specialist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “The beauty of PACE is that it ties the cost of retrofits to the property rather than the homeowner.”

In less than two years, the PACE model has gone from being the dream of a few forwardthinking mayors to a major policy initiative set to expand nationally.

The program’s appeal is simple: besides offering savings to homeowners, it creates green jobs for contractors and benefits the planet at no net cost. Manning, who has seen his auditing business increase tenfold in the past year, calls the approach a “winwin-win-win situation.”

The Fittest Will Survive Charles Darwin explained how species emerge and disappear, but he didn’t know about genes—the biological currency that makes evolution possible.

Today we know that the more genetically diverse a species is, the more likely it is to survive various threats, such as a warming or shrinking habitat.

Diverse populations are more likely to contain individuals that can pass on preferential traits, enabling a species to evolve and live on. Unfortunately, that doesn’t always happen.

Now Richard Gomulkiewicz at Washington State University and David Houle of Florida State University have developed a set of formulas that mathematically marry rates of habitat destruction, population change, genetic variability, and other factors, enabling them to predict whether a species is on track for extinction.

It’s difficult for ecologists to factor evolution into their projections for a species’ future habitat needs, Gomulkiewicz explains, adding that these formulas constitute a model that “tells you when it just won’t be possible [for a species to avoid extinction].” The model could be refined and employed by field biologists in the future, and may one day help wildlife advocates and federal officials to prioritize scant resources and focus on imperiled species with better chances of survival.

—lind s e y k o n k e l

illustration by steve wacksman

and, as in the case of Babylon, some will tap into special government funds. PACE financing is appealing to lenders because of its low-risk structure: in the event of repayments are structured to be a foreclosure, proceeds from the less than the projected savings on sale of the property would first be energy costs, so the retrofits more used to make good on delinquent than pay for themselves. Another PACE payments before satisfying bonus: if you move, the remaining mortgage debts.

Of course, drumming up conpayments fall to the next owner, who also inherits the lower cost sumer interest is a vital part of the program. In Babylon, town and greater comfort of a more efficient, less drafty home. employees fanned out in public “We know people aren’t goparks, at pools, and on beaches, ing to come up with thousands offering residents reusable waof dollars for insulation,” says ter bottles, bags, and beverage Steve Bellone, the town supervicozies in exchange for filling out sor. “And if they’re thinking about questionnaires and learning more selling, they’re not going to make about home energy use.

Ria Muriello learned about the improvements that benefit the program in the local paper. An next owner.”

In the United States, homes acebullient grandmother of five, count for 20 perMuriello went cent of carbon online to fill dioxide emisout a detailed The program’s appeal is simple: sions, mostly questionnaire besides offering savings to homeowners, through electricabout her it creates green jobs for contractors and ity use and heathome—from ing systems that the number benefits the planet at no net cost run on natural of chandeliers gas and oil. Effishe has (four) The PACE model is attract- to the age of her washing maciency improvements, which can be completed in a matter of hours, ing powerful backers. Last Oc- chine (10 years)—and provided can lower energy consumption tober Vice President Joe Biden a two-year history of utility use. as much as 40 percent. By 2020, made PACE a key component of She spent $250 for an energy auimplementing such retrofits na- his Recovery Through Retrofit dit and was approved for $6,298 tionwide could cut emissions by plan, citing the unrealized po- worth of weatherization, to be up to 160 million metric tons an- tential of home energy retrofits paid off over seven years with nually—the equivalent of taking to create green jobs, especially help from utility company rebates 30 million cars off the road—while among contractors idled by the and federal tax credits. Contracsaving homeowners $21 billion in real estate slump. So far, 14 states tors blew 12 inches of fiberglass utility bills each year. have changed their tax laws to into areas around her porch and The Babylon program and a allow for PACE programs, pav- stuffed four inches of dense-pack handful of similar projects around ing the way for some of the na- cellulose into the garage walls, the country—in places like Boul- tion’s major population centers along with other upgrades. The der, Colorado, and Berkeley, to get in on the game. Already, work, projected to save her $925 California—are known by the Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New a year, was finished in a day. acronym PACE, which stands Orleans, New York City, and San Babylon has retrofitted nearly for Property Assessed Clean En- Francisco have begun to lay plans 300 homes in the past year, cutergy. The PACE model topples for PACE-style programs. ting annual energy bills and The programs will vary from greenhouse gas emissions by the traditional barriers that make homeowners reluctant to under- place to place, in part because of about $1,020 and four tons of take improvements—namely, the differences in tax and municipal carbon dioxide per house. high up-front costs—and offers an finance laws. Some municipalities Muriello, who was recently enticing new way to spur energy will issue bonds, some will secure laid off, is happy with the results. savings and curb greenhouse gas financing from investment banks “I’m not feeling drafts and my bills emissions from homes. or other private lending partners, have gone down,” she says.

F R O N T LIN E S

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]

I meet with business people every week, and lots of companies say they are sitting on making investments right now because they don’t know what the rules are going to be

It’s more nuanced than that, because we’ve got John Kerry, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman leading a bipartisan effort to craft legislation that won’t result in the same sort of squabbles that perhaps have existed previously.

If the price of getting 60 votes is to risk weakening the legislation, wouldn’t it be more effective to simply act administratively?

the climate czar

What Carol Browner can do for the planet.

it’s job number one Americans are hungry for work and the nation’s global competitiveness is at risk. For the White House, an energy and climate bill is all about the economy. when he established the

senior White House position of assistant to the president for energy and climate change, Barack Obama created one of the most important and politically challenging jobs in his administration. He chose someone with an interview with long experience in climate issues and C arol B rowner Washington politics: Carol Browner,

by James Gerstenzang the highly effective administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from 1993 to 2001. Browner’s mandate is to create jobs, enhance energy security, and combat climate change. That means integrating the work of a variety of federal agencies; forging cooperation among federal, state, and local governments; building partnerships with the private sector; and being constantly aware of how changing political dynamics in the nation’s capital affect—and are affected by—-the responsibility of the United States to be a global leader on climate change.

In a conversation with James Gerstenzang, Browner made it clear that comprehensive energy legislation, with bipartisan support, remains one of the administration’s top priorities. Gerstenzang, who covered the White House and the environment for the Los Angeles Times, is editorial director of the Safe Climate Campaign.

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Well, because of a 2007 Supreme Court decision, the EPA has authority [to regulate CO2 as a pollutant] under the existing Clean Air Act. The science proves that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare.

The next steps in the process are the proposed rules, the first-ever greenhouse gas standards for cars. And what the president has said repeatedly is that we’re going to follow the science, we’re going to follow the law. But in the meantime, we want comprehensive energy legislation, because we need all the pieces of the puzzle.

The administration’s pitch for climate legislation seems to be based on the economic arguments.

When we look at what’s going to stimulate private-sector capital investments in the new energy future, it’s comprehensive energy reform. That’s where we are going to give the business community the predictability that allows them to make those investments. History is a perfect guide. Every time we have a debate, for example, about the Clean Air Act and acid rain,

some industry says it absolutely cannot be done. We set a standard, or Congress sets it, or the EPA sets it, and guess what happens? American innovation and ingenuity find a cheaper, faster way to solve the problem. There are lots of people in the business community who will tell you that’s exactly what is going to happen if we put a cap on carbon and set a renewable electricity standard. Then you will see the capital investment. And with that will come the jobs.

Any estimates on numbers?

Our latest figures show that by the end of 2009 the outlays and tax credits for clean energy saved or created 52,000 clean energy jobs. Rather than retrofitting a coal-fired power plant from the 1950s or 1960s people are going

climate intel For the latest climate-

related happenings on Capitol Hill from the people who know the business from the inside, visit NRDC’s staff blog, Switchboard. There you’ll find news and opinion from the same scientists, policy experts, and climate advocates who keep the nation’s top journalists up-to-date. And for those who really want to stay on top of things—and ahead of the headlines—you can sign up to have new posts from your favorite bloggers sent directly to you. Just visit switchboard.nrdc.org, and under “Issues” look for “Solving Global Warming.”

left: Jeff Haynes/UPI/Landov; right: illustration by ken orvidas

How are you going to get 60 votes for a climate bill in the Senate, given that you have not only opposition from the Republicans but disagreements within your own party?

to be making the component parts of a clean energy future, whether it be the batteries for the new generation of vehicles, or the biofuels, or the wind turbines, or the solar cells. Those manufacturing facilities have to be profitable here in the United States, and the way to make them profitable, to guarantee them a market, is to set the standards. Germany has a huge percentage of the world’s manufacturing jobs. Why did that happen? Because they had a clean energy policy, and so businesses were prepared to make the investments that created those jobs.

What’s your overall assessment of Copenhagen, as you look in the rearview mirror?

We are very pleased with what we were able to achieve. It was, I think, a direct result of the president’s personal engagement. To me, he really ended up being the person putting the deal together by working with the various groupings of interested countries: China, India, Brazil, South Africa, the coalition of African nations, Europeans. And I think we got things that we haven’t gotten before, for example, commitments on transparency that are hugely encouraging.

Jonathan Pershing, the lead U.S. negotiator in Copenhagen, has raised the idea of focusing more on bilateral agreements and less on the U.N. process. Might that not isolate the United States from its natural allies, such as the small island nations, which are at immediate risk from sea-level rise, or the European Union?

action is such that we want to take advantage of all appropriate forums, using every tool available to achieve real reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

We need to do both. The U.N. process is important because it gives every country an equal voice. But it’s not our process. At the same time, we worked with China on some important bilateral commitments and similarly with India. The magnitude of the problem and the need for global

Well, we have taken tremendous actions over the last year. If you look at our domestic agenda, it starts with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. A study was just published that shows we may have the best year ever in terms of investments in renewable energy. We recently announced $2.3 billion in tax credits for the manufacture of renewable components. So we’re not just putting up the facilities, building the solar farms, the wind farms, the geothermal plants. We’re also investing in the manufacturing.

And what happens in Congress will also shape the attitude of business.

Yes, the second step would be comprehensive energy legislation, so there’s absolute clarity in the business community as to what’s going to be expected of them. I meet with business people every week, and lots of companies say they are sitting on making investments right now because they don’t know what the rules are going to be. We have a lot of folks who believe we are in danger of missing out on the global opportunities for clean energy technology.

If you look back at what the administration has done on global warming, what one thing would you change?

I think we’ve been very successful in using our executive authority, whether it’s on appliance standards or the work going on around fuels. You have two ways to create change from a broader perspective: one is through the legislative process and the other is through executive authority, and I think we have moved very successfully on both fronts.

How much political capital is the president willing to spend on this, with everything else on his plate?

You know, you don’t get the job to do the easy work. You get the job to do the hard work. When people said we couldn’t do it in the House, the president went to work and we passed in the House.

There were people who said he shouldn’t go to [the U.N. climate conference in] Copenhagen. But he went and he made it a hugely important step forward on the global commitment to climate change. Now we need to do the rest of it and get a binding international treaty. The president has said repeatedly that this is one of his priorities, that it’s absolutely essential in terms of moving our country forward in this global market for clean energy.

In the past, China has tended to take a wait-and-see approach, to see what we would do first.

A better mac(intosh)

S

cientists and historians estimate that more than 14,000 varieties of apple have been cultivated in the United States, but over the past 100 years, much of that diversity has been lost as agriculture shifted its focus to large-scale production of just a few types. Today a mere 11 varieties account for more than 90 percent of all domestic apple sales. The good news is that researchers at the University of Arizona and the U.S. Department of Agriculture have recently identified 110 genetically unique types of apple on abandoned homesteads in the Southwest. The newly rediscovered heirloom varieties have survived for decades in the arid Southwest, indicating that they may contain genes that confer resistance to dry weather­—an important trait that could come in handy for apple breeders if climate change —l.K. increases the frequency or severity of droughts.

So no regrets?

Well, you always want to do more. If you do six efficiency standards, you want to do twelve.

But we have to do these in ways that are defensible. Also, we inherited eight years of inaction.

In the first year of an administration, a lot of what you do is framed and set by what the prior administration did.

Going into your second year, what’s the one thing you see as essential?

Getting Congress to pass comprehensive energy legislation.

Spring 2010

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Big Wind, Small Space Starting your own wind

Tracking the pack

Laurie Lyman keeps her eye on imperiled wolves.

she runs with the wolves As federal funding for wildlife research shrinks, a retired schoolteacher and citizen scientist helps pick up the slack: a tale of devotion from Yellowstone National Park

aurie Lyman is perched

in the middle of a harmonic convergence. A lilt of wolf song is wafting from a broken line of mountains in front of her, answered by a howling soloist on the flanks of Specimen Ridge, about a mile to the south.

She is bundled beneath a layer of goose down, a hat with ear flaps, and footwear that looks like an astronaut’s. As she tries to locate the canid clans in her spotting scope, she explains in a whisper that the larger chorus belongs to the Druid Peak pack.

“Let’s listen,” she says, “and see if members of the Agate Creek pack reply.”

Lyman is one of the most highly regarded wolf trackers in Yellowstone National Park. And, at age 58, she serves as a lesson to anyone carrying an AARP card that real adventure still lies ahead: until six years ago, she was a grade school teacher in suburban San Diego. Now, says Rick McIntyre, a biologist with the park’s wolf project, “Laurie is a better spotter than I am.” In fact, he adds, she is “one of the best in the

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—cryst a l g a m m o n

Friends of a Feather It’s shaping up to be a

world” in terms of her ability to observe and interpret the subtleties of wolf behavior in the wild.

Hauling around a spyglass mounted on a tripod nearly as tall as she is, Lyman is out every day, logging her observations in a field journal. Each evening, she e-mails the day’s highlights to McIntyre and other researchers. Her work is unpaid, just a hobby one might say, but McIntyre and wildlife advocates consider it especially valuable at a time when federal agencies are struggling to fund vital research.

On this frigid morning the Agate Creek pack remains elusive. But from signals emitted by the wolves’ radio collars, Lyman knows the pack is on the move, so she will be too. She’ll spend the next few hours driving her Subaru station wagon along an undulating road in search of the best vantage points for spotting wolves. From there she will record notes about who’s mating with whom, who’s leading hunts, which wolves are helping to rear newborn pups, and which packs are fighting with other wolves­—or running up against other deadly predators, namely grizzlies.

Last fall, when Montana wildlife officials allowed

good year for bird aficionados.

Those who already know and love all things bird should check out welovebirds.org, a blog and social networking site created by the Natural Resources Defense Council.

There you can mix with other birders and share stories, photos, and videos. You can also sign up for action alerts to help protect your favorite feathered friends.

If you’re looking to sharpen your bird-identifying skills, try the Audubon Society’s new iPhone application. Available at audubonguides.com, it allows you to search by location, shape, or other characteristics so you can match what you observe in the field with an actual species.

left: photograph for onearth by ian van coller; opposite: Jeff Hutchens/Getty

L

by todd wilkinson

farm but lack the backyard space? Try vertical-axis windmills. When grouped properly they’re more efficient than the more common propeller-style, horizontalaxis type, says Robert Whittlesey of the California Institute of Technology. In the right arrangement, vertical-axis turbines benefit from drafting, much like fish swimming in a school, making it possible to pack vertical turbines into just 1 percent of the space that would be required by an equivalent number of horizontal-axis turbines. And the faster they rotate, the more visible their cylindrical shape appears, making them safer for birds than traditional windmills.

the state’s first wolf hunt in the better part of a century, Lyman realized that one of the wolves killed was the alpha female of the Cottonwood pack, a regular in the valley. With her deep knowledge of wolf behavior and pack dynamics, Lyman knew the loss of 527, as the fallen female was known, would inevitably lead to the death of others in her pack.

What appeared on paper to be the death of a single wolf was in fact much more.

“Her shooting and the subsequent loss of others have caused chaos among the wolf populations of the Lamar Valley,” Lyman says. “After [527] was shot,

her pack splintered,” she adds, motioning toward the location of their former territory. When an alpha wolf is killed, packs are often left aimless or killed off by rival packs, she explains. Sometimes individuals disperse to establish new territories.

Immediately after she noticed that 527 had been shot, Lyman sent out an e-mail alerting fellow wolf watchers and advocates. Her message intensified an already heated campaign to close the hunt. Hunters had taken out 13 wolves in southwestern Montana, surpassing the government’s quota of 12. The state suspended the hunt and resolved to revise

its rules before this year’s hunt.

“These amateur wolf watchers are giving us information that allows us to understand a bigger picture,” says Lisa Upson, a wildlife advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council, which, along with other environmental groups, filed a lawsuit in June 2009 to stop the federal government from stripping the wolves of their protection under the Endangered Species Act. If successful, there will be no hunt this year at all. Lyman’s contributions are vital, Upson says, because they provide “a special kind of knowledge that doesn’t come through in government data.”

what’s in an empty cage?

“We as humans go to great lengths to satisfy our desire for a connection with the natural world, especially in our interactions with wild and exotic animals,” says Daniel Kukla, who took this photograph of an empty neotropical rainforest exhibit at the Prospect Park Zoo in Brooklyn, New York. But zoos, he says, “often obscure the conflicts inherent in maintaining and displaying captive wild animals.” For his series Captive Landscapes, Kukla photographed the interiors of animal enclosures adorned with painted landscapes and plastic plants at eight different zoos across the United States. Kukla asks us to consider whether we create such scenes not for their educational value, but because they make us feel better about the animals’ captivity.

An Ancient Carbon Fix Sometime around 2000 B.C.,

the Amazon people discovered a trick for improving crop yields. They found that plowing the charred remains of burned food scraps, manure, and other organic waste into carbon-poor soil made plants grow better. What they didn’t know was that they had also discovered a method of carbon sequestration that could benefit a future civilization: ours.

When allowed to decompose naturally, wood chips, yard clippings, cornstalks, and other types of organic matter give off about 90 percent of their carbon in the form of methane and carbon dioxide.

But cooking them at high heat under low-oxygen conditions forms what’s known as biochar, which retains as much as 50 percent of the organic material’s original carbon. Some scientists who study biochar, including those at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, argue that we could theoretically dial back global warming by turning plant waste into biochar and mixing it into soil.

The British company Carbon Gold is among the first to try to cash in on biochar’s promise.

Though neither the United Kingdom nor the United States has implemented policies that would promote biochar, as of February, Australian political leaders were debating plans to make biochar a centerpiece of the country’s carbon-cutting effort.

—L.K.

Spring 2010

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how to wage war on food waste

T

by laura wright

wo Saturdays after Thanksgiving, I slept in. At around 11 a.m., I padded into the living room with a feeling of quiet contentment. My husband, Peter, had been up for a few hours, during which time he’d read the paper, made coffee, cleaned out the fridge, and taken out the trash.

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Our refrigerator had been getting difficult to close, jammed as it was with two-week-old turkey scraps, mashed potatoes, Brussels sprouts, and other Thanksgiving leftovers that nobody had eaten, plus the wilting greens and vegetables that never became salad. There were partially full containers of sour milk, dried-out slabs of poorly wrapped cheese, and three half-full tubs of hummus. Peter had cleared it all out, and I was aghast.

That was my job, I said.

Peter stared back, perplexed.

I mean, my job, I insisted—as in researching the environmental impact of food waste. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to tell him that to write this story, I’d be tallying up our own cast-off food items. I stood at the kitchen window, my forehead pressed against the cold glass, peering down into the airshaft where our apartment building’s garbage cans are stored. At that moment, I may have been the only woman on the planet who was annoyed with her husband for cleaning out the fridge and taking out the trash while she slept.

Peter and I are part of a much larger problem. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that Americans waste 30 percent of all edible food produced, bought, and sold in this country, although it acknowledges that this figure is probably low. Recently, two separate groups of scientists, one at the University of Arizona and another at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), published estimates of 40 percent or more. Add up all the losses that occur throughout the food chain, the NIH researchers say, and Americans, on average, waste 1,400 calories a day per person, or about two full meals.

As kids, we were all admonished to finish what’s on our plate for the sake of those starving children in poor, faraway countries. Among environmental issues, however, food waste barely registers as a concern. Yet when we do the math, tallying all the resources required to grow the food that is lost as it journeys from farm to processor to plate and beyond, the consequences of our wastefulness are staggering: 25 percent of all freshwater and 4 percent of all oil consumed in this country are used to produce food that is never eaten.

Some 13 percent of all municipal solid waste consists of food scraps and edible cast-offs from residences and food-service establishments— restaurants, cafeterias, and the like. That’s about 30 million tons a year, or enough food to feed all of Canada during that same period. When all that food decomposes in landfills, one by-product is methane, which has 20 times the global-warming potency of carbon dioxide. Based on Environmental Protection Agency data, rotting food may be responsible for about one-tenth of all anthropogenic methane emissions.

Part of the problem is the heterogeneous nature of food waste—there is no single culprit, just many diffuse sources that add up to a slow and steady bleed on the economy and the environment. Supermarkets discard misshapen yet perfectly edible tomatoes, for example, because they don’t look perfect to picky shoppers; convenience stores cook too many hot dogs on snowy days when customers are scarce. Back on the farm, approximately 7 percent of crops are not harvested each year because of extreme weather events, pest infestations, or, more

illustration by alison seiffer

living green

commonly, economic factors that diminish producers’ willingness to bring their products to market: a bumper crop can reduce commodity prices to the point where the costs of harvesting are greater than the value of the crop.

But the biggest players in the food industry—farms, processors, and supermarket chains—are not the largest contributors to food waste. Compared with what we toss out at restaurants and in our own homes, the nation’s supermarkets stack up relatively well.

According to USDA statistics, in 1995, some 5.4 billion pounds of food were lost at the retail level, while 91 billion pounds were lost in America’s kitchens, restaurants, and institutional cafeterias. In other words, food-service and consumer loss make up 95 percent of all food waste, which means most of the responsibility falls on those who prepare the food we eat, whether it’s a homemade meal, a dinner at a sit-down restaurant, or the Egg McMuffin we gobble down during the car ride to work. How, exactly, those numbers break down is poorly understood.

“There has been very little done on consumer-level food loss,” laments Jean Buzby, a senior

economist at the USDA’s Economic Research Service. Buzby maintains estimates for losses incurred from the farm to the market, but equivalent records for consumer losses do not exist. As a result, Buzby can’t say how much edible food is lost in cafeteriastyle dining halls versus momand-pop restaurants or, for that matter, any other place we scarf down a meal. As for what happens at home, Buzby explains,

[

that we waste as much as we do.

The amount of turkey Peter and I threw out on one day amounted to 1,465 calories, or about seven servings. Add that to the approximately 780 calories’ worth of mashed potatoes (homemade, with butter and whole milk) that I gathered up—though considering how slippery the potatoes were in my rubber-gloved hands, I’m sure I didn’t get them all. Plus the hummus, the milk, and the cheese.

]

Add up the losses throughout the food chain, and Americans, on average, waste 1,400 calories a day per person, or about two full meals

researchers have trouble quantifying food loss because some of it never enters the municipal waste stream. “We don’t know what gets put down the disposal or fed to the dog,” she says.

The squishy trash bags I ended up retrieving from the bins outside our apartment building illustrated the dilemma: not only are we largely unaware of the consequences of food waste, but we also have a hard time imagining

SHORT TA K E

Reuse, Recycle It’s funny to think that the old, familiar phrase­—Reduce, Reuse, Recycle—also applies to the food we eat, but it does, says Darby Hoover, an NRDC expert on solid waste. Individual consumers can donate extra canned and nonperishable goods. Restaurants, institutions, and commercial venues can go one step further, donating perishable items, too. Feeding America, a nonprofit hunger-relief group, maintains a database of local food banks that participate in food recovery efforts: feedingamerica.org/partners/product-partners.aspx If you’re ready to start composting at home, check out NRDC’s Simple Steps for photos and instructions: simplesteps.org/how-tos/how-build-your-own-composter

Statistically speaking, our throwaways were perfectly average: specialty items, plus fruits, veggies, and dairy products, which are quick to spoil, especially if bought in excess amounts. And although the tailings of our feast had left me with more wasted food than I would have tossed during an average week, the underlying reasons were the same: I didn’t know how much food I’d need for our holiday dinner, and I tried out some new dishes that were not as popular as I had hoped.

I recounted my story to Kevin Hall, the lead author of the recent NIH study, and he laughed. It was a problem familiar to him.

“I eat the same darn thing over and over, and therefore I know how much to buy,” he says. “I know I eat a pear a day, so once a week I can go and buy myself seven pears. But if I start changing it up or varying the size of the pears, I don’t know what to do.”

Hall and his colleagues refer to the “push effect,” which is similar to the “wealth effect”: have more money, will spend more money.

“In the supersize-me world, people will eat more, but they won’t eat all of what they are given,” he says. “If we have all this excess in the supply chain, the system will find ways

to sell it to you. They will push from the farm to your fork, and you will eat a little bit more, and you will throw out a little bit more.”

Planning meals better, using leftovers creatively, and making just enough—instead of too much—seem like obvious, simple solutions. But they matter, Hall explains, because we don’t have good solutions for dialing back the push effect. That’s something he’s trying to change. In May, he will gather with experts on food and waste issues to start to look for topdown fixes to the problem.

Consumers can do the most good by embracing the good old “Three Rs”: reduce, reuse, recycle. Food recovery programs play an important role by collecting surplus food from supermarkets, dining halls, and restaurants and delivering it to food banks and homeless shelters, where it is badly needed. For apple cores, potato peels, and other inedible food scraps, there’s composting—at home and, in a handful of places, on the municipal level.

I’m working on the first “R” (Reduce!) right now. For starters, I’m sticking to what I know in the kitchen, cooking dishes I know I can prepare in just the right amounts. Peter and I are ordering takeout less, which means fewer jumbo-size portions that get partially eaten and partially thrown away. I’m also spreading the word, recounting my new-found knowledge to others. And the more I talk, the more I discover that my friends are as frustrated as I am. They, too, seem to buy more than what they need, often in packages that bear baffling sell-by, use-by, and other food expiry codes.

At dinner not long ago I confessed my food foibles to my friend Sarah, who in turn lamented the frequency with which she finds herself confronted by a refrigerator laden with wilting greens. “Really,” she said with a laugh. “Who needs that much cilantro?”

Spring 2010

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driven

Š 2009 American Honda Motor Co., Inc.

race to the future

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how one car maker’s engineering ingenuity and dedication to efficiency blazed a trail to the 21st century b y c r a i g c a n i n e

future chic Honda’s P-NUT is not intended for commercial sale, but it shows how fuel efficiency can be combined with radical design.

was straight out of a Sheryl Crow song. I was standing on Santa Monica Boulevard across from a giant car wash, looking for some fun, the Los Angeles sun beating down, when a gorgeous, garnet-red car pulled up. The driver offered me a lift, so I hopped in and we drove off. I felt a little thrill. The ride was so quiet and smooth, the car’s interior so roomy and luxurious. It was my virgin excursion in a car powered by hydrogen.

The car was a Honda FCX Clarity and its driver was Terry Tamminen, former head of the California Environmental Protection Agency and chief policy adviser to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Tamminen left state politics in 2007 to start a nonprofit consulting

changing times The Honda Civic, left, may look clunky, but its newly designed engine was revolutionary when it hit the market in 1975. The P-NUT, right, Honda’s vision of an urban runabout, hints at the company’s future.

firm that works on sustainability issues. He is one of about a dozen people in the Los Angeles area who have so far been chosen by Honda to lease one of its sleek, aerodynamically sculpted Clarity sedans.

As we drove around, I was struck by the generous legroom in the front passenger seat—one of several pleasing side effects of the lack of an internal combustion engine under the hood. Another was the absence of engine noise as Tamminen accelerated. Instead I heard the softly rising hum of an electric motor, a sound that reminded me of riding in an elevator.

“My wife drives a natural gas–fueled car,” he told me as we cruised.

“It’s also a Honda, their Civic GX, which has the world’s cleanest internal combustion engine. I’d happily lease a hydrogen car from another vendor, but Honda’s is the first fuel-cell vehicle that’s certified by the government to market to ordinary consumers.”

This is only one of the many firsts that Honda has compiled in a long history of introducing progressively cleaner, less polluting products to the American automobile market. In 1975 Honda became the first automaker to introduce an engine—the CVCC, powering the Civic—that met the Clean Air Act’s standards by combusting fuel more completely and cleanly inside the engine, rather than taking the comparatively inelegant Detroit approach of “scrubbing” pollutants out of post-combustion exhaust gases using a costly device called a catalytic converter. Honda was also the first in its industry to meet a series of increasingly stringent emission standards set by the California Air Resources Board (CARB). Honda’s 1984 CRX-HF was the first mass-produced car to get more than 50 miles per gallon. The company has consistently ranked number one (occasionally slipping to second place, behind Toyota, and now vying for first with Hyundai) as the automaker 2 6 onearth

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with the highest Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) ranking. Perhaps most telling, in 2005 Honda broke ranks with the rest of the auto industry to voice support for stronger federal fuel efficiency standards and to embrace the challenge of meeting aggressive greenhouse gas reduction goals.

This record has earned Honda something of a green halo. It has, in fact, been singled out as the most environmentally responsible automaker by a spectrum of advocacy groups, academic researchers, and industry analysts. “Honda is number one when it comes to the environment,” says Daniel Sperling, head of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis, and current appointee to CARB’s automotive engineering seat. “However you look at it, whether in terms of corporate philosophy, product mix, or the technology in any particular vehicle, Honda generally ranks at the top.”

Honda’s green streak extends to that other kind of green, as reflected on its balance sheet. Although its sales have plunged along with those of its competitors in the past couple of years, Honda has maintained a healthy ratio of cash to debt while General Motors and Chrysler, drowning in red ink, groveled for (and received) huge cash infusions from the government, emerging from bankruptcy as shadows of their former selves.

How much, I wondered, has Honda’s past record of environmental leadership contributed to its current, relatively healthy financial position? What inspired the company’s green streak in the first place, and how deep is it? And to what extent (if any) are the fallen titans of Detroit looking to Honda as a model to emulate as they cast about for survival strategies? I traveled to Honda’s American headquarters in Torrance, California, in search of answers.

nrdc: behind the wheel A MECHANICAL ENGINEER BY TRAINING, ROLAND HWANG is NRDC’s transportation program director. He works on transportation, energy, and climate issues at both the state and federal levels. last year president obama announced a national program to cut auto emissions. how does this relate to the administration’s overall climate policy?

There are two critical aspects to the program. First, it will be an important step toward the pollution reductions needed to avert dangerous levels of global warming. Second, it demonstrates that what seems at first politically impossible—in this case, getting agreement among regulators, automakers, and environmentalists—can actually be achieved if all parties work productively and in good faith toward a solution. So we see the program as helping to pave the way for an agreement on an economy-wide cap on carbon.

To read more about transportation policy and the future of the U.S. auto industry, visit onearth.org/article/hwangauto

civic: courtesy of American Honda Motor Co., Inc.; p-nut and fcx clarity: © 2009 American Honda Motor Co., Inc.

The scene

C D B

A

honda’s fcx clarity: how it works the key to a hydrogen-powered vehicle is the fuel cell stack (A), which operates like a miniature power plant, generating electricity to drive the car’s motor (B).

By using compressed hydrogen stored in a tank (C) behind the rear seat and combining

THE American

it with atmospheric oxygen, the process produces no CO2 or other pollutants. With thinner fuel cells and a smaller box than previous designs, the V Flow Honda FC Stack fits neatly into the car’s central tunnel between the front seats. When extra power is required for start-

Honda Motor Company occupies a neatly landscaped 110-acre campus in Torrance, about 20 miles south of downtown Los Angeles. My first appointment was with Ben Knight, vice president of research and development. Tall and soft-spoken, with thinning light-colored hair and gray-blue eyes, Knight is a 33-year veteran of the company, which he joined soon after receiving degrees in mechanical engineering and business administration from Stanford University. “Honda is a company that cares about the customer and society, and it’s very difficult to provide value to both,” he said. “That’s the challenge.”

Rummaging through a folder of papers, he pulled out a printed PowerPoint graphic. “This is what we call the Three Hill slide,” he said.

The “three hills” were a trio of rising curves on a graph that plotted society’s increasing environmental concerns over time. The first of these curves, in black, depicted growing alarm, starting in the mid-twentieth century, over worsening air quality. The second, an ascending red line, was labeled “Climate Change.” The third hill, a green line sloping up above the red one, represented Americans’ burgeoning interest in energy sustainability. Each of these hills, Knight told me, was the focus of a distinct set of goals that have guided Honda research and product strategy from the 1970s to the present and will set its priorities for the future.

“We created this as a kind of R&D road map back when air quality was the biggest concern on the public’s mind, and the only concern of the regulatory agencies,” he said. “But we saw climate change coming

up and acceleration, electricity from the fuel cell stack is supplemented by a lithium-ion battery (D). When the car decelerates, the electric motor acts as a generator, converting kinetic energy into electricity, which is then stored in the battery.

as a growing societal concern, and then, arising from that, the desire to move away from petroleum to alternative fuels, to vehicles and infrastructure that would address long-term energy sustainability.”

In its efforts to conquer the first hill—slashing emissions of the six so-called criteria pollutants that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates under the Clean Air Act: nitrogen oxides (NOx), sulfur oxides (SOx), carbon monoxide, lead, particulate matter, and ground-level ozone—Honda pushed the internal combustion engine to new heights of fuel economy and cleaner emissions. Knight reeled off a series of Civic models that set industry-leading precedents: the CRX-HF in the mid-1980s, the Civic VX in the early ’90s, and the Civic HX in the later ’90s. These models were never best sellers, but “all of them are successes in Honda’s mind,” Knight told me, “because there was a lot of learning going on in combustion technology, transmission technology, aerodynamics, and customer acceptability.” This learning could be applied to the rest of Honda’s product lineup.

Knight was especially proud of research in the 1990s that culminated in the four-cylinder 2000 Accord sold in California. “Our goal was to take emissions of the gasoline internal combustion engine to near zero, and we achieved it with this car—not just in a lab but in real-world driving conditions,” he said. In collaboration with the College of EngineeringCenter for Environmental Research at the University of California, Riverside, Honda fitted a 2000 Accord sedan with air-testing equipment, then drove the car around the Los Angeles area. The onboard analyzer measured levels of pollutants in the air coming into the engine through spring 2010

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its air intake and the air going out through the exhaust pipe. Knight pointed to a series of graphs on a PowerPoint slide showing that the car’s exhaust contained lower levels of NOx and hydrocarbons than the intake air. The car was, in effect, filtering pollutants out of the air. This was the first gasoline-powered car to meet California’s Super-Ultra-LowEmission Vehicle (SULEV) tailpipe standard, which meant it was about 90 percent cleaner than a typical gasoline-fueled car. “This is a fantastic story,” Knight said, beaming.

What motivated

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“man maximum, machine minimum” Ben Knight’s design philosophy calls for smaller mechanical parts and more room in the car for people.

they learned early in their careers, that ‘clean’ could sell cars.”

Honda’s response to the 1975 emissions standards mandated by the 1970 Clean Air Act contrasted starkly with that of the Big Three U.S. automakers. The prevailing view in Detroit at the time was that the only way to reduce toxic engine emissions was by adding catalytic converters—that is, treating dirty exhaust gases after they had been created in a car’s engine. But catalytic converters had several drawbacks. First, they were expensive. Second, early catalytic converters were fragile and finicky and often made vehicles perform more sluggishly. Third, they required unleaded fuel, but “regular” gas still contained lead in the mid-1970s as an additive to reduce engine knock.

Rather than going back to the drawing board, Detroit lobbied, litigated, and lamented, beginning a pattern of reflexive opposition to environmental standards that lasted for 40 years. Ironically, after scoffing at Honda’s CVCC engine when it first appeared in the 1975 Civic, each of the Detroit manufacturers wound up licensing the technology.

Honda’s success in meeting the provisions of the Clean Air Act through revolutionary improvements in engine technology put the company on a defining course—one that set it distinctly apart from the Detroit Three. “That core experience became part of the company’s culture and DNA,” Bienenfeld said.

Today Honda claims an 11 percent share of the U.S. automobile market, well behind its chief Japanese rival, Toyota, which has a 17 percent market share. But as an industry bellwether in developing ever-cleaner and more efficient cars, Honda has always had a disproportionally large influence in Detroit. “In many areas, we take Honda more seriously than Toyota,” GM vice chairman Bob Lutz told the Detroit News in 2007, “especially when it comes to engine technology... Honda doesn’t have the scale of Toyota, but they’re also on a very fast track” to growth.

amanda marsalis

Honda to make these innovations while Detroit did all it could to thwart tougher regulations and higher fuel efficiency standards? According to Knight and other corporate insiders, it all goes back to the company’s founder, Soichiro Honda.

Born in 1906, the first son of a blacksmith and a weaver, Honda was good with his hands and mechanically inclined. By the age of 21, he was in charge of a branch office of an auto-repair business. In 1946 he took a small military-surplus engine and fitted it to a bicycle, using a hot-water bottle as the fuel tank. Honda’s motorized bicycles proved popular in postwar Japan as an inexpensive way to get to and from work. Good fuel economy was an essential feature, because Japan had no oil reserves of its own; gasoline was a precious (and pricey) imported commodity.

Honda established its first beachhead for exports in 1959 with a small storefront in Los Angeles, which initially focused on motorcycles. At the time, these had a bad-boy image in the United States.

But Honda effectively countered this marketing challenge with its “You meet the nicest people on a Honda” ads, starting in the early 1960s, coupled with its 49cc Super Cub, a peppy little motorbike that projected an image more Petula Clark than James Dean.

In 1970 Honda put out feelers by exporting small numbers of its first automobile, the N600 sedan, to the U.S. mainland (it had earlier sold a few in Hawaii). Smaller and almost 600 pounds lighter than a Volkswagen Beetle, the car was inexpensive both to buy and to operate. Enough N600s sold to suggest that there was an opening for such a car in the American market. It made sense: public concern about pollution was on the rise, prompting Congress to establish the EPA in 1970 to set new regulatory standards. American automakers were busily adding chrome, tail fins, and more powerful V-8 engines to their cars, all but ignoring safety and pollution issues. Honda directed some of its best engineers, previously assigned to the company’s successful racing division, to produce a cleaner, more efficient internal combustion engine.

The result of this initiative, which Honda called CVCC (for Compound Vortex Controlled Combustion), changed the fluid dynamics in each cylinder in a way that caused more complete combustion of fuel. This had the double advantage of reducing dirty tailpipe emissions and boosting fuel economy. Honda began putting its groundbreaking engine into a more refined successor of the N600, called the Civic, in 1974—just when Americans were reeling from the effects of the Arab oil embargo.

“There was a huge positive response, both from regulators and from the market,” said Robert Bienenfeld, senior manager of environment and energy strategy at American Honda. “I think Honda woke up to the idea that not only was this environmentally friendly technology good for society, but it was good for business. And until June of 2009, every CEO that the company had came out of the small engineering team that worked on the CVCC. They all carried with them this lesson

At Honda

Robert Bienenfeld’s job is to work with agencies such as the EPA and CARB to plan the company’s strategy for adapting to the changing regulatory landscape over the next several decades. He is, in other words, the company’s top futurist. “California set a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050,” he said. “That number is extraordinarily challenging. It means that on a per-vehicle basis, we’ll have to cut CO2 emissions by 90 percent. And that’s not just from the tailpipe; it includes all the upstream emissions as well.”

“Upstream” refers to everything that has to happen to get a fuel from its source to the vehicle that will use it, or from “well to tank.”

In the case of gasoline, upstream emissions include any carbon released while pumping crude oil out of the ground, refining the oil, and transporting finished fuel to a filling station. “In the really, really clean future of 2050,” Bienenfeld said, “the thinking is that liquid fuels—probably low-carbon biofuels of some kind—might have to be reserved for aviation, marine shipping, and heavy-duty trucking.

In that case, light-duty vehicles won’t be able to burn anything. The upstream carbon emissions alone of gasoline would exceed the CO2 levels we’re talking about. So even a plug-in hybrid vehicle, at that point, wouldn’t work, because it has an engine that burns something.

You’d need a battery electric vehicle or a fuel cell.”

To encourage others at Honda to think about what the future may bring, Bienenfeld started a reading group. “We’re reading classics of environmental literature,” he told me, including Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, John McPhee’s Encounters With the Archdruid, Malthus on population growth, and A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. The goal is to understand the insights of past environmental thinkers and ponder what lessons they might teach about the future. It’s hard to imagine

Honda was not completely immune from the upsizing trend, adding a few larger vehicles to its lineup rather late in the game. These products, however, represented an extremely measured, modest concession to the enormous pressure that Honda management was feeling from stockholders, the automotive press, and its own dealers to develop more big vehicles and brawny V-8 engines to go with them.

Toyota, which had ambitions of dethroning GM as the world’s largest automaker, adopted a product strategy that looked a lot like the U.S. automakers’ enthusiasm for truck-based vehicles. But Honda held back, never offering a V-8 option.

This meant that it missed out on some of the fat profits its competitors made on their Expeditions, Tundras, and Escalades. In the long term, however, keeping its fundamental focus on efficient, small- to medium-size cars served it well. “Honda knew that an efficiency edge was important to their brand, and they stuck with that,” says John DeCicco, a senior lecturer on transportation energy policy at the University of Michigan. “They may have forgone some profits during that period, but they maintained steady growth. So when market conditions changed, as they have recently, Honda was in the best position to weather the storm.”

In the summer of 2008, when a big spike in gas prices coincided with growing signs of economic crisis, the most immediate emergency facing U.S. automakers (and Toyota) was coping with their sudden, huge overcapacity in manufacturing light trucks. They couldn’t shut down factories quickly enough. Meanwhile, Honda’s biggest problem was that, in spite of its storied manufacturing flexibility, it could not keep up with the demand for the Fit, a roomy subcompact rated at 34 mpg on the highway. The marketing tag line for the Fit was “Small is the new big.”

This ever-so-Honda slogan has become the new mantra in Detroit.

honda’s success at meeting the provisions of the clean air act through improvements in engine technology set it apart from the detroit three and became part of the company’s culture and dna such a group convening in the halls of, say, Chrysler’s headquarters in suburban Detroit. Changing a corporate culture obviously involves more than reading groups, but it’s tempting to wonder whether the Big Three would have come as close to financial collapse as they did last year if they had nourished this kind of deep thinking.

The crucial turning point on Detroit’s road to near-ruin came when sport utility vehicles started to dominate the new-vehicle marketplace.

The roots of the SUV phenomenon went back to 1975, when Congress passed the law establishing fuel economy standards but left a loophole that set less stringent standards for light trucks (which, at the time, were mostly commercial vehicles, including pickups). Americans developed an appetite for larger vehicles in the mid-1980s thanks to historically low gas prices, which came on top of an economic recovery and growing disaffection for the shoddy smaller cars Detroit was desperately pumping out to comply with CAFE standards. Families began to discover vehicles, like the Jeep Cherokee, that were classified as light trucks but felt more like plushly appointed cars or station wagons. Detroit exploited the light-truck loophole for all it was worth, returning to profitability as baby boomers snapped up ever-bigger SUVs, which were inexpensive to make relative to the high prices they could command.

I timed my

visit to Honda to coincide with last December’s LA Auto Show, which I hoped would provide some colorful context at a redefining moment for the U.S. auto industry. I arrived just in time to catch a press conference at the Honda booth. Dave Marek, director of advanced design at Honda R&D Americas, stood by while a veil was whisked from one of the latest conceptual studies from his studio. It was the shell (without working parts) of the P-NUT, short for PersonalNeo Urban Transport, and it resembled a terrestrial version of a Jedi starfighter—a minicar shaped like a truncated airfoil topped with a swept-back cowling of smoked glass.

Marek is a rock star among car designers. With his amber glasses, pointy-toed, lizard-skin boots, and unique hairstyle (nothing on top, a military shave on the sides, and wispy trails in back), he looks like Bono with a mullet. The three-seater P-NUT, he explained, was Honda’s vision of “a vehicle conceived exclusively around the city lifestyle.” Yet Honda was not explicitly touting this design exercise as a “green car.” That would have been so 2007. The implicit message was: “We know how to make ultraefficient cars; we’ve moved on now to make ultraefficiency both fun and stylish.” spring 2010

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From the look of the surrounding booths, the rest of the industry was desperately trying to catch up. I couldn’t count all the “green” and “eco” cars that vied for attention all over the Los Angeles Convention Center’s dozen football fields’ worth of exhibition space. All the major automakers except Chrysler had hybrids to tout, signaling the arrival of gaselectric dual power trains to the automotive mainstream (if not yet the mass market). The main event at Ford’s booth was the unveiling of a North American version of the 2011 Fiesta—an answer to Honda’s Fit. (Ford’s introduction, in January, of the 2012 Focus further reflected the company’s shift toward smaller, highly efficient cars and “crossovers,” which are nouveau, post-SUV station wagons.)

The real story of the show, however, was the number of manufacturers that unveiled plug-in electric hybrids, which run mainly on batteries that are recharged from an electric outlet and also have a small gasoline (or even diesel) engine that powers a generator to extend battery life and vehicle range. Ford had a plug-in version of its Escape hybrid available for test drives. GM’s long-prophesied (and much-hyped) Volt was on prominent display, as well as a Volt-based concept, the Cadillac Converj. And Toyota showed off a plug-in Prius, expected to hit the market in 2011.

A growing drumbeat of opinion among industry watchers insists that plug-in hybrids are the inexorable next step in greening the vehicular landscape. Federal energy policy has also tilted the playing field in favor of plug-in hybrids and pure battery electric vehicles (BEVs). Yet Honda, historically a leader in so many other advanced fuel-saving technologies,

climate change, Honda is investing in a portfolio of research projects in all these areas. Its skepticism about the near-term viability of plug-ins has not dampened a keen interest in batteries, which, after all, are essential components of gasoline-electric hybrids as well as fuel-cell vehicles.

Honda’s booth at the Tokyo Motor Show last October featured the EV-N Concept, a relentlessly cute, retro minicar powered by batteries charged by rooftop solar panels. Tucked inside the passenger door was a truly out-there product of Honda’s research labs: the UX-3 personal mobility device, a Segway-like unicycle that balances itself.

Looking farther out, toward the “third hill” of energy sustainability, Honda has a hand in developing a number of alternative-fuel technologies. For several years it has collaborated with a research institute in Japan to develop an efficient process for making cellulosic ethanol using inedible parts of the rice plant. The company is also supporting research into strains of algae that produce a low-carbon biofuel. A subsidiary company, Honda Soltec, makes solar panels from thin-film photovoltaic cells; Honda has installed these panels not only on buildings and ships but also on a prototype refueling station.

Much more critical to the company’s near-term success, however, is further advancing fuel efficiency with conventional hybrid technology.

Here Honda has struggled, losing some of its green public relations sheen to Toyota and even to its closest American imitator, Ford. In 1999 Honda was the first car company to launch a hybrid in the U.S. market, the 2000 Insight. Never expected to set any sales records, the Insight

the official line, repeated to me by knight, bienenfeld, and other honda representatives, is that no single “silver bullet” technology will emerge triumphant in the fight to build tomorrow’s cars has lagged conspicuously behind in this area. It has demurred in the rush toward battery power in a way that is reminiscent of its refusal to develop a V-8 engine a decade ago—and for the same basic reason. The company’s governing philosophy is “do more with less.” Batteries, in their current state of development, require doing less with more: more cost, more weight, more hassle (with the frequent need for lengthy recharging), and more worries about limited range.

What’s more, plug-in hybrids and BEVs may have low-to-zero tailpipe (“tank to wheel”) emissions, but they are hardly carbon free, especially if the electricity stored in their batteries comes from a coal-fired power plant. Given the current national average mix of fuels used to generate electricity, Honda’s Ben Knight told me, a BEV has about the same carbon footprint as one of today’s gasoline-electric hybrids. Both generate the equivalent of about 250 grams of CO2 per mile, from well to wheel. So there’s little point, Knight and his colleagues say, in jumping on the plug-in bandwagon until the electric grid gets a lot cleaner and/or batteries get a lot cheaper, lighter, and less prone to overheat. In the meantime, similar CO2 results can be achieved using existing hybrid technology.

The official line at Honda, repeated to me by Knight, Bienenfeld, and other company representatives, is that no single “silver bullet” technology is going to emerge triumphant in the battle to build tomorrow’s sustainable cars. Imminent crops of plug-in hybrids and BEVs will jostle with the already robust stream of gas-electric hybrids that are entering the marketplace, with a few other technologies—hydrogen- and natural gas–powered cars, for instance—sprinkled into the mix. In its assault on 3 0 onearth

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was a proving ground for the technology that Honda then put into a hybrid version of the Civic, on the theory that more people would buy a hybrid if it came in a conventional package. But the distinctly unconventional-looking Prius, which Toyota first offered American buyers in 2000, proved this theory wrong. “The second-generation Prius came out [in 2003] at a time when there was rising awareness about climate change, the Iraq war had turned unpopular, and energy security was an issue,” Robert Bienenfeld told me, a bit ruefully. “The Prius became iconic as a way of making a social statement. It was more powerful than a bumper sticker. Toyota has been riding that wave since.”

Honda hoped to fire a salvo across Toyota’s bow last year when it began selling the 2010 Insight hybrid in the United States, pricing it several thousand dollars below the Prius. But sales have fallen far short of Honda’s projections. Against this somber backdrop, Ford’s 2010 Fusion Hybrid and, before that, its hybrid Escape have won effusive media accolades. Honda hopes to catch a break with the CR-Z, a sexy hybrid sports coupe that is scheduled to hit showrooms this summer.

A hybridized Fit is expected to follow soon.

The speed bumps in Honda’s rollout of hybrids will eventually recede in the rearview mirror, if it keeps up its past success in overcoming obstacles. What could prove more challenging in the long run is making good on its substantial bet on hydrogen fuel-cell technology. The FCX Clarity, which I rode in with Terry Tamminen and, a day later, took for a test drive at Honda headquarters, is the most sophisticated and advanced hydrogen car yet produced by any automaker. Nearly all of the world’s

he says, “if Honda didn’t think it might work. Maybe they’ve made a mistake. But I’d want to watch a bit longer before making a final conclusion, because they’ve been right so many times before.”

no automaker

amanda marsalis

the futurist Part of Robert Bienenfeld’s job is to predict what the nation’s energy mix will be, and how clean our energy grid will be, in the next 40 years.

major car companies, including GM, Ford, Chrysler, and Toyota, have developed prototype fuel-cell vehicles. But some have announced that they are discontinuing their hydrogen programs to concentrate research efforts on plug-in electric vehicles; others have voiced alternately hot and cold attitudes toward the technology, depending on shifting levels of federal support for transportation fuel-cell research.

One of the strongest arguments against hydrogen is the lack of a distribution infrastructure. Honda and other members of the California Fuel Cell Partnership (comprising Chrysler, GM, Toyota, and other car makers as well as energy companies and government agencies) are trying to change that by opening at least 46 public hydrogen stations, starting with clusters in four Southern California communities. Tamminen refueled his FCX Clarity at one of the few retail hydrogen pumps now open, at a Shell station on Santa Monica Boulevard. Filling up the tank—about the size of a trash can stowed behind the rear seats—with enough fuel to give the car a range of 240 miles took less than five minutes.

The other big strike against fuel-cell cars is the inefficiency of using hydrogen as a fuel. Prying pure hydrogen away from other elements to which it binds itself, like the oxygen in H2O or the carbon in natural gas, requires energy and releases CO2. In Honda’s vision of “the really, really clean future of 2050,” that energy will come from renewable, carbon-free sources. On its Torrance campus, the company has created a prototype of a home refueling station that uses solar energy from Honda’s own photovoltaic panels to produce hydrogen from water—an elegant solution that also addresses the infrastructure issue.

Many observers question whether Honda’s big bet on hydrogen will pay off. Skeptics abound. One of them is Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Campaign, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. “I would be much more pessimistic about hydrogen,”

is perfect. Honda may be the greenest of the bunch, but its record is not without blemish. For example, Honda joined a lawsuit against AB1493, California’s groundbreaking 2002 law that set standards for tailpipe greenhouse gas emissions. I asked Edward Cohen, vice president of government and industry relations at American Honda, why it went along with the rest of the industry in opposing the law after proactively embracing previous emission standards. “We were not seeking to block greenhouse gas standards,” Cohen said. “In fact, at the same time that suit was filed, we urged the federal government to set higher CAFE standards. The reason we participated in the lawsuit was that we truly believed that you can get more done with a national standard than with a single California standard.”

While the lawsuit (which was ultimately defeated) was working its way through the courts, Honda and a few of its industry peers were taking part in behind-the-scenes talks with California regulators, environmental groups, and, eventually, members of the Obama administration to seek ways of building a bridge of consensus between California’s greenhouse gas standards and some kind of positive action at the federal level. The effort ultimately succeeded beyond anyone’s most optimistic expectations. On May 19, 2009, President Obama stood in the White House Rose Garden and announced new greenhouse gas and fuel economy standards for passenger vehicles.

“I never seriously thought I’d live to witness a moment like this,” says Roland Hwang, transportation program director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “There were people from all the major automakers, the EPA, the Department of Transportation, the State of California, and several of us from the environmental community, all coming together in agreement on tougher standards for greenhouse gas emissions and fuel economy. I had to pinch myself.”

Even as other car makers start to behave, outwardly at least, more like Honda, there is a difference at the company’s core that still sets it apart from its American rivals, especially GM and the perhaps fatally damaged Chrysler. “Honda for its whole history has had CEOs that have come out of Honda R&D,” says John Casesa, a leading Wall Street automotive analyst for many years who is now a principal in the Casesa Shapiro Group, a consulting and financial advisory firm. “The people who run the company are the people who have created these great products. Whereas in Detroit, the management has historically come from finance and accounting. Honda is an engineering-driven company, not marketing driven. It doesn’t market as aggressively as its competitors—the products speak for themselves. That’s getting more difficult to do, because the market is now so competitive.” In the future, the issue is not whether Honda continues to be the greenest automaker or continues to build its market share. What really matters is whether the industry as a whole adopts Honda’s efficiency-driven DNA. Honda has always liked a good race. The tougher its competition gets in this particular contest, the better off we’ll all be.

Contributing editor Craig Canine once drove across the United States with his teenage son in an old souped-up Honda Civic. Now he drives a more sedate hybrid. spring 2010

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t r u e c o n f e ss i o n s o f a

Citizen Scientist One woman’s quest to become the world’s leading expert on a bug

b y S h a r m a n A p t R u ss e l l

N

ine years ago, I visited London’s Natural

History Museum, a massive building reminiscent of a cathedral with its fawn and blue-gray stone, arched windows, and pinnacles, but with the whimsical touch of animals molded and cast in terra cotta on every wall inside and out. At the time, I was doing research for a book on butterflies. With these credentials—knowing something about writing and little about butterflies—I was permitted entrance to the ground floor of the entomology department, an inner sanctum that went up and down six floors and contained 30 million insects in 120,000 drawers. For an afternoon, I walked dimly lit corridors and opened wooden cabinets to reveal the still-astonishing beauty of insects caught more than a hundred years ago: tiger swallowtails, red admirals, checkered whites, snouts, tortoiseshells. My guides at the museum were men and women working on such projects as the 18-volume series Moths of Borneo or tracking down the British Empire’s archenemies of collections everywhere: book lice and carpet beetles.

Late in the day, I had an interview with the museum’s Keeper of Entomology, Dick Vane-Wright. We talked about serious matters like the deforestation of the Philippines and the declining numbers of butterflies in the world. We also chatted at length about eating insects. When the Natural History Museum reprinted the classic 1885 tract “Why Not Eat Insects?” (“Why not indeed!” asked the author. “I see every reason why cabbages should be thus served up, surrounded with a delicately flavored fringe of the caterpillars which feed upon them.”), Vane-Wright went on a promotional tour as the quintessential good sport, crunching locusts over the radio and frying up mealworms on the BBC. During the course of our interview, he explained, “Eating insects is a challenge of social mores and cultural norms. It punctures people’s pomposity.”

At the end of our conversation, the Keeper of Entomology said something that has stayed with me for years: “There is so much we don’t know!” Vane-

illustration by matthew holmes

Spring 2010

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The life cycle of

Calligrapha serpentina

A single beetle can lay more than 300 eggs each season.

eggs

Wright sounded excited and distressed at the same time. “You could spend a week studying some obscure insect and you would then know more than anyone else on the planet. Our ignorance is profound.”

Nodding wisely, I wrote the comment down in my notebook. I liked its humility. And I liked its challenge and implied sense of wonder—there is still so much to discover.

Almost a decade later, the import of Vane-Wright’s words has only deepened. Certainly our humility has deepened. There is so much we don’t know about climate change, say, and about what life will be like without the polar ice caps or the Amazon rainforest. Our ignorance is more profound than we thought.

At the same time, as we lose about a hundred species a day in the current mass extinction, the idea that there is still so much to discover strikes me as a kind of miracle. We think we’ve beaten the world flat, hammered out the creases, starched the collar, hung her up to dry.

We’ve turned the earth into our private estate—a garden here, a junkyard there—and as such it feels no longer wild, no longer mysterious.

And yet…You could spend a week studying some obscure insect and you would then know more than anyone else on the planet.

It’s a strangely cheerful thought. Could it be true?

H

umans have managed to find and

Beetle larvae grow in stages called instars.

instar

and observation), and learn some basic field research and laboratory techniques. Someone like me would need to work her way up from rank amateur to professional amateur, often abbreviated to pro-am, also known as citizen scientist.

For some time now, traditional research in entomology—how insects behave and where they live—has been the realm of the professional amateur. Partly this is because there are so many species to keep track of and so many good field guides. And then there are all the new Internet sites to help the amateur do this work. While there is some concern that amateurs aren’t rigorous or detailed enough, many scientists welcome the help, especially as climate change causes species to head north or south or disappear altogether.

You could spend a week studying some obscure insect and you would then know more than anyone else on the planet.

I have always wanted to be a field biologist. I imagine Zen-like moments watching a leaf, hours and days that pass like a dream, sun-kissed, plant-besotted. I imagine a kind of rapture and loss of ego. John Burroughs, a nineteenth-century American naturalist, wrote that he went to nature “to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in tune once more.” Burroughs captures exactly my own experience walking through the rural West. I enlarge in nature.

I calm down. At the same time, eventually I get bored. Eventually I go home because my work (my writing, my students, my laundry) is elsewhere. But what if that employment, my engagement with the world, was right there, in the largeness and calm of nature?

describe an estimated 1.9 million species, about a million of them insects. Every year about 2,400 beetles and 1,200 flies are added to the list. Most biologists believe there are more than 10 million aniI imagine Zen-like moments watching a leaf, mal species in the world still to hours and days that pass like discover. In the United States, a dream, sun-kissed, plant-besotted some 73,000 animal and plant species are unnamed. Recently, in a book called Red Desert: The History of a Place, an entomologist For Burroughs and other naturalists, a passion for what is obscure wrote about spending 36 hours sampling insects in the Wyoming and unsung in nature is about passion itself. This is the herpetologist desert, making him the world’s leading expert on the area’s arthro- mad for a leopard frog, the botanist most happy parsing forbs. In some pods. Of the 5,000 insect species that live in the desert, he estimated way, such unworldly love is about authenticity. To devote your life to crayfish? That’s authentic. that several dozen were not known to science.

Such love is also about competence and a vertical burrowing into When the Keeper of Entomology at the Natural History Museum knowledge.

Vertical would be a new direction for me, since my undersaid “you” could spend a week studying some obscure insect and standing of the world is almost completely horizontal. I know a little become a world authority, the you in that sentence was an entomologist. Only an entomologist could gain the necessary knowledge in bit about a lot. I stretch around the world knowing a little bit about such a short time, not someone like me who doesn’t know a beetle’s state politics, national scandals, ocean chemistry, and Indonesia. My anterior apodemes from its mesonotal stridulatory file. Someone like reach is long, but I don’t go deep.

The woman (scientist, pro-am, or rank amateur) who wants to unme would take much longer. Someone like me would have to immerse derstand the Canyon Rubyspot damselfly, however, must think differherself in insect physiology as well as general principles of ecology, ently.

She must also know about canopied streams, insectivorous bats, choose her obscure insect carefully (focusing on ease of collection 3 4 onearth

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Many beetles pupate naked, without a cocoon or casing.

pupa

Juveniles emerge with their wing patterns complete.

juvenile

and flycatchers. She must think vertical, burrowing into one place.

I have always wanted to be John Burroughs, and I have also wanted to be a rock-and-roll musician. Here I am, a woman in her fifties, in good physical shape, with a lively mind, having zero chance of becoming so many things—an ER doctor or the creator of cool television shows.

We are defined by our limits as much as our loves. At every point in life, there is a long list of what we will not ever be.

You could spend a week studying some obscure insect and you would then know more than anyone else on the planet.

John Burroughs was one of those semi-annoying optimists. “If you think you can do it, you can,” he wrote. “Leap and the net will appear.”

Could I take not a week but many weeks in my life and become what I was not: a “leading world authority” on some obscure species of mite or dragonfly in the Gila Valley of southwestern New Mexico, which also happens to be my own backyard?

I

am searching in my kitchen drawer

for cheesecloth. Marriage is about balance. My husband is a saver. I am a purger. Just last week, I purged this kitchen drawer of a wad of cheesecloth that I pretended had gone stale. We never use cheesecloth! But now I need it for my tiny pink-orange eggs and tiny black larvae and somewhat larger black larvae and rather active Calligrapha serpentina adult beetles that I am keeping in a series of labeled jars. A square of cheesecloth secured with a rubber band would be the perfect lid, preventing escape while allowing in air. I have also been told to wet a wad of cheesecloth and leave it in the jar so the insects won’t desiccate. I feel a familiar stab: purger’s regret.

In my efforts to become a leading world authority, I have already made my first big mistake. I did not choose Calligrapha serpentina for its obscurity. I went for beauty instead. This leaf beetle is a stunner, with shiny green-gold wings marked by a sinuous, symmetrical pattern of black dashes, swirls, and fillips. Even the name is beautiful, the name of the lover in a poem, “Oh, Calligrapha! Oh, Serpentina!”

Typing just a description of this insect into Google gets me 10 photos on BugGuide.net.

Fortunately, the life cycle of Calligrapha serpentina is not as celebrated or well known. As a member of the large and commonly encountered beetle family Chrysomelidae, in the genus Calligrapha (with more than 80 recognized species native to North and South America), this insect is not even noteworthy as a pest, unlike its cousins the potato, cucumber, asparagus, and bean leaf beetles. As one entomologist explained to me in an e-mail: “In spite of their showy appearance, little is known about the life history of most species of Calligrapha. Much of the information that you desire has never been

After about a week, the red juveniles turn metallic green.

adult

published. If you carefully document and publish your observations, they would constitute valuable scientific contributions.”

That was exactly what I wanted to hear.

Early in the summer of 2009, when I first dreamed of becoming a pro-am, dozens of these metallic green beetles were vigorously mating on the leaves of the globe mallow (Sphaeralcea augustifolia) growing in my yard. About one centimeter long, the insects clamored and humped on top of one another like so many miniature Volkswagen pileups. On the underside of globe mallow leaves, their eggs could be found massed irregularly in pink-orange groups, each cylindrical pink-orange egg about one millimeter long with smooth and shining ends.

Although I never observed a beetle laying eggs, in 1908 the zoologist Robert Hegner watched a similar species and wrote one of the few descriptions. As the insect clings to the undersurface of a leaf, the tip of its abdomen “moves rhythmically up and down about fifteen times at intervals of a little less than one second,” he wrote. Following a drop of colorless liquid, the egg emerges and is attached to the leaf by the fluid. The insect shifts slightly, and the process begins again.

Hegner studied 54 pairs of beetles of three species, Calligrapha multipunctata, Calligrapha bigsbyana, and Calligrapha lunata, with host plants of willow and wild rose. The females, slightly larger than the males, each produced an average of 315 eggs from June 15 to

nrdc: why insects matter NRDC’s Science Center is led by Gabriela Chavarria, an expert on bees who earned her doctorate in entomology under E. O. Wilson. She works to protect insects—particularly bees—by fighting to remove toxic chemicals from the environment.

What can the average citizen do to protect bees?

The next time you walk out into your backyard, look around.

Insects are the little creatures that run the world. Bees pollinate many of our crops, yet they continue to be threatened by pesticides and other toxic chemicals. We tend to be afraid of bees, but 95 percent of them do not sting. If you find a bee’s nest, don’t knock it down. Find a local beekeeper in the yellow pages and call to report the hive. Beekeepers are increasingly interested in collecting feral hives to breed more robust and genetically diverse bees. You can also go to beesafe.org to learn more about taking other actions to protect bees.

For more, visit onearth.org/article/citizensciencebugsqa

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Family: Tettigoniidae

August 27. The average time for hatching was about six days, and the small emerging larvae were gregarious, eating their host plant together, shedding their skins together as they grew larger, dropping to the soil to pupate at about the same time, and emerging together as adults. Hegner found the average larval stage to be 20 days and the average pupal stage 12 days—about 38 days from egg to beetle.

My observations of Calligrapha serpentina were much the same, although I never had as many insects or watched their rhythmic movements quite so closely. I did raise a number of eggs to adults, cheering on as the squirming dots of black broke out of their egg cases, began to eat the leaf they stood on, and grew steadily into dark, hairy lumps with reddish-brown heads and six legs. As beetle larvae grow and shed their skin, each new stage is called an instar. Compared with its former miniatures, the final instar of Calligrapha serpentina seemed monstrous—a great galumphing fellow covered in long bristles, the head and front legs seeming to strain and heave their appendage of a body like Jabba the Hutt in the Star Wars series.

In my role as voyeur, I was also a manipulator, a kind of God in the life of Calligrapha serpentina. Not all of my charges survived. In truth, the habitat I provided was hit or miss. Too much water, and a fungus could grow that would attack the eggs. Too little water, and the larvae dried up. I sometimes had to travel with my jars (who can you really trust to feed your larvae?) and wondered about the effect of the car’s motion. I knew that temperature could alter the timing of my beetles’ hatching and growing, and I worried that the jars were too much in the sun. Or in the shade? Some of my black dots may have been worried too. A surprising 3 6 onearth

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number of them escaped through the holes in the cheesecloth. In the end, these insects may have done better with me than in the wild, where they would have been constantly exposed to predators.

Whenever I felt particularly inept, I went online. Sites such as buglifecycles.com and BugGuide.net offer all kinds of information and anecdotes. Asked nicely, professional entomologists readily send advice. One consoled me: “Freezing excess immatures is a painless (to them) and effective method of discarding insects you probably cannot and/or should not release locally. Alas, there is much death and death-dealing in this work.”

This same entomologist concluded: “Please remember, specimens are worthless without data. THIS IS ALL ABOUT THE DATA. And it’s about sharing your data through publication for the entertainment and education of others. I assign a specimen number to every animal or series of like animals when I collect them. These numbers go on their jars, written on masking tape. So a monarch larva gets the number 9856, say, and a series of pyralid caterpillars in their communal webbing initially gets the number 9857, with each caterpillar getting a letter code when they are isolated, as 9857-A, 9857-B, etc. Thus when I get two parasitoids, different wasp species, from jar 9857-M, I know that both wasps developed inside A SINGLE CATERPILLAR, which is high quality information.”

One day, in my own jars, a number of the monstrous black instars of Calligrapha serpentina started turning pinkish-orange and then became wholly pinkish-orange and finally could be seen writhing and thrusting out their abdomens in what appeared to be a painful and desperate

JOEL SARTORE/National Geographic Stock (2)

There are some 6,400 species of katydid on the planet. The one shown here belongs to the sub-family Phaneropterinae.

act. It could be that this is how instars bury themselves in the dirt in tera From New Mexico,” the heavily illustrated 1941 “Relationships order to pupate. I don’t know. I couldn’t watch for long because I had Within the Family Chrysomelidae as Indicated by the Male Genitalia to go to work (a fact that instantly labels me Not a Real Naturalist). of Certain Species,” and the 2006 “The Evolution of Unisexuality in Later I would find the pupae motionless in the soil that I had put in Calligrapha Leaf Beetles.” It is a small personal library my friends the bottom of the jar. Beetles often pupate naked, without a cocoon are welcome to peruse on any weekday from 9 a.m. to noon. or protective casing. Under my hand magnifier, each pink-orange Unfortunately, my own documentation was essentially confined to oval seemed to contain a curled-up, mummylike creature beneath a notes on my desk calendar, with “eggs in Jar #2 hatched” sandwiched translucent coating—although there may have been no actual coating, between “call optometrist” and “potluck at Madge’s, make salad.”

I have no plans to publish, only to e-mail a few entomologists (“I only the shiny surface of the half-forming beetle.

Days later still, the miracle: metamorphosis, the great spiritual think the red coloring of Calligrapha serpentina is the juvenile phase! metaphor and enactment of myth. Sometimes I could see the pat- I’m so excited!”) and tell my new friends on buglifecycles.com and terned wings under what still looked like a thin covering and then BugGuide.net. I did not, did not, become a leading world authority the legs were distinct and then the beetle quivered and was there, on Calligrapha serpentina. And, yes, I feel bad about withholding moving as if dazed, fumbling in the dirt. In a few moments the wings that information until near the end of this essay.

Sorry. had dried and the miracle began to lumber across the bottom of the jar toward a globe mallow leaf.

Now—and again and again as the beetles pupated and emerged—I hat I did do was add my voice to a saw that the resulting insect was beautifully colored red and black, not chorus, standing shoulder to shoulder in that growing green and black. Had I raised up the wrong species? Was I a kind of anticrowd of citizen scientists who rarely become indinaturalist? Particularly gifted in doing the wrong thing? Was this some vidual experts but who contribute to the collective exeffect of an artificial environment? Or, since some beetles are known to pertise. We send our observations to the real experts hybridize, perhaps this represented a cross between species? who can then make them part of their research and publication.

As my jars filled up with pure red and black beetles, all looking Moreover, for the citizen scientist, this is not really about publishalike, I theorized that red was a juvenile stage—a possibility no one ing data, as important as that is. The further job of the citizen scientist had mentioned to me or discussed in the is to mesh the world of science with, well, the scientific literature. In about a week, the red world of citizenry. We trumpet the beauty of beetles turned green. Testable question.

Calligrapha serpentina to friends, co-workers, Hypothesis. Conclusion. I felt like a kid who relatives, real estate developers, and politiFamily: Papilionidae cians. The more we fall in love with our own had just won first prize at the science fair.

Papilio glaucas, commonly Okay, this was not the first of many “valubackyard—with the marvel and complexity of known as the eastern tiger able scientific contributions.” I never could life—the more committed we are to protecting swallowtail, can be found in backyards east of the Rockies. determine how many instars the larvae went its diversity.

In my case, once I started looking for one through. My examination of the pupae was beautiful green and black beetle, I found so hardly thorough and did not include dissection.

As important, I am not sure how the beetle much more: many more eggs, brown or white, overwinters. I think the last adult generation of red or yellow, and many more larvae, some the season goes dormant once the temperature that deceive by looking like bird droppings and drops. (By the first of September, I could not some that hide by rolling up in leaves. In a single morning, I might find a marbled orb weaver like find any beetles outside on my globe mallow.)

But I wouldn’t bet my life on it. some aproned, plump grandma, 1,675 ants, and I also never became comfortable with beetle the grace of a pipevine swallowtail. I saw that Dick Vane-Wright was truly right when he said, “There is so much we Sometimes I had to travel with my jars don’t know,” and that lots of things (who can you REALLY trust to feed your larvae?)

I don’t know are outside my front and wondered about the effects door, the theater of insects playing all summer long. anatomy. In volume 2 of American Beetles, when I am faced with a deNor is my infatuation with Calligrapha serpentina over. I have scription of Chrysomelidae in which the dorsum is “usually glabrous, learned that I am not really made for the exacting work of a scientist, vestiture when present sparse to dense and consisting of simple hairs,” the tedium of 9857-A, 9857-B, 9857-C. A leading world authority needs I can only murmur back, “ ’Twas brillig and the slithy toves/Did gyre many more jars and would label them better. But I do have plans next and gimble in the wabe…” fall for a large outdoor terrarium filled with the larvae and beetles I do believe, however—and I am proud of this—that I have a fairly of Calligrapha serpentina and their host plant. As cold weather apcomplete collection of all the papers ever written on Calligrapha proaches and the globe mallow dies, I can watch and observe. How serpentina, including the 1897 “Biological Notes on Some Coleop- do these beetles overwinter? I hope to find out.

W

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Renewable

HHenergyHHH catches on in

red america (A post-partisan

HHHHlove story)HHHH Kern County, California, Went Republican by 18 Points in the Last Election. Now It’s captivated by wind and solar power. here’s Why.

O

by michael behar

n a crisp, cloudless morning in November 2002, Susan Hansen stood atop California’s Cache Peak clutching a satchel containing the ashes of her husband, Homer. Susan, now 75, had reached the summit on a rock-strewn trail, climbing for an hour through scrub oak, bull pine, and juniper. The 6,676-foot-high Cache Peak, which protrudes from the Tehachapi Range about 40 miles east of Bakersfield, is situated almost wholly within the Hansen ranch.

Susan’s in-laws are also buried on the mountain. In 1946 they purchased the MASTER PLANNER property—more than 50 square miles—from the Southern Pacific Railroad.

Lorelei Oviatt sees “The first one up was my father-in-law,” Susan tells me when I visit her this hillside in Kern in December. “It took 12 people to carry his casket to the top, and we had County’s Tehachapi to dynamite a hole in the rock for the grave.” After that fiasco, the family Range as a great decided cremation would be easier. Once her in-laws had passed away, the example of a profitHansens divided up the property and sold their shares, except for Susan able wind farm. and Homer, who kept an 11,000-acre plot. There they started a cow-calf operation that at its peak had 1,000 head of cattle.

Susan recounts the story as we stand on a natural terrace below Cache Peak in Jawbone Canyon, an arid moonscape at the eastern edge of Kern County. With one notable difference, the clear and cool weather is identical to what it was on the day she scaled the peak to scatter her husband’s ashes. “Normally it’s windy, very windy,” she says. Hot updrafts rising from the sun-baked Mojave Desert create

HHHHHHHHHH

photographs by amanda friedman

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low pressure at the surface, which sucks in cold, dense air from the Pacific Ocean to fill the void. This thermal effect is one of the most ferocious wind machines on earth.

“In the 1980s, our interest rates went to 24 percent and the bank started looking [to foreclose on] our land,” Susan recalls. “So my husband started searching for ways to make the property earn its keep, and that’s when he taught himself about wind power.” There were lots of ups and downs along the way—inadequate transmission lines, a burst of new deals with the dot-com boom, another slowdown when that bubble burst—but eventually Homer forged a partnership with a company called Zilkha (now Horizon Wind Energy). “He signed the option three days before he died,” she says. The Los Angeles Department of Water & Power later took over the lease and the project went online last year with 80 turbines, each generating 1.5 megawatts of electricity.

I first heard about the Hansen ranch from Lorelei Oviatt, the special projects division chief for the Kern County planning department. At 8,202 square miles, Kern, with a population of 800,458, is roughly the size of New Jersey and encompasses several disparate

ecosystems—the Central Valley, Sierra Nevada, and Mojave Desert.

Oviatt wanted me to see firsthand one of her county’s celebrated successes: a 120-megawatt wind farm that enriched its landowner (Susan won’t say exactly how much she earns but made it clear that her family would never have to worry about money) while helping bring new jobs to a region that has a 15.1 percent unemployment rate. Oil, agriculture, and aerospace have been the economic mainstays in Kern for nearly a century. Petroleum still chugs along. But cheap imported produce has decimated local agriculture; severe water shortages are shuttering what farms remain; the once-thriving

what is essential to oviatt is that renewable energy investments create jobs and boost tax revenue. if the icing is green, all the better.

n r d c : F INDING T H E RIG H T PLACE JOHANNA WALD IS A SENIOR ATTORNEY IN NRDC’S SAN Francisco office and an expert on the use of public lands. the obama administration is committed to largescale renewable energy projects. but this raises a fundamental question: where will they go?

Like any large energy project, they will have significant impacts.

Utility-scale solar projects typically require thousands of acres of land, which is frequently graded and denuded of vegetation.

Once these plants are built, electricity generation will be the sole use of the land—and they will be there for a very long time.

Wildlife habitat will be gone, and so will the values of open space and wildness. In addition, depending on the technology and the location, solar projects can use a lot of water, a very limited and precious resource in the West. They will also require major new transmission lines that will cross public lands. yet nrdc is broadly supportive of such projects.

If we’re going to meet the climate challenge, we will need at least some of these large-scale projects in addition to energy efficiency and conservation measures. We also need smaller “distributed generation” at the level of individual rooftops and mid-size projects where the energy is purchased by utilities. But of course all these projects must be sited carefully, and none should be located in places with unique or sensitive resources.

For more about debates among environmentalists on the siting of renewable energy projects, visit onearth.org/article/waldqa

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dairy industry struggles to profit; and the military is downsizing (the advanced F-22 and F-35 fighters are tested at China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station and Edwards Air Force Base, both of which spill into the county, but President Obama has slashed these programs).

To combat the downturn, Oviatt has been on a mission to attract renewable investment and transform Kern into what she calls “ground zero” for green energy. Doing so means fostering alliances between competing interests, and this, she admits, can be a nightmare. While the Hansen project was being put together, environmentalists complained it would disrupt wildlife habitats, specifically those of the Mojave ground squirrel and the desert tortoise. Indians feared desecration of sacred burial sites. Neighbors complained that the soaring towers would spoil alpine views. The U.S. Department of Defense claimed that the turbines would be a hazard to pilots who fly high-speed maneuvers in the area, often at near-ground level. The “bird people,” as Susan calls them, filed suit, arguing that spinning rotor blades are an avian hazard. One of their concerns was that the Sierra Nevada transects a major flyway, so turbines pose a threat to migratory species. Another concern is the endangered California condor, although Oviatt says no report exists of the condor ever being killed or maimed by a wind turbine.

Oviatt ultimately got the project approved. But if you think she did it to save the planet, you’d be only partly correct. She concedes that promoting green power is terrific, and AB-32, California’s aggressive legislation to curb greenhouse gas emissions, is fueling frenzied interest in wind and solar. But she considers her pursuit of renewable energy a civic duty to help Kern prosper in the long term. “This is a red, conservative-based county,” she says. “We are not Berkeley. We are embracing renewables because they’re practical.” What is essential to Oviatt—and to her bosses, the five elected members of the county board of supervisors—is that renewable energy investments create jobs and boost tax revenue. If the icing is green, she says, well, all the better.

Despite Kern’s political conservatism, county planners have largely escaped a knee-jerk backlash against anything green by pushing for projects on private property rather than on public lands. Where landowners have raised objections, they tend to be very specific and are usually couched in terms of qualified support. (“Look, don’t get me wrong here— I think this is a good thing; I’m just worried that...”)

In Kern, as elsewhere in the United States, most wind and so-

lar resources are FORECAST: SUNSHINE located in rural Developer Jeff Roberts areas, where hopes that this unproductive farmland will be landowners frethe future home of one quently lean right. of the world’s biggest Targeting private solar energy plants. property, Oviatt says, is an easier sell.

Energy projects almost always raise land values and therefore generate more property tax revenue. The developer covers the increased taxes for the landowners and pays them annual royalties based on how much energy their properties produce. Some landowners also get signing bonuses, leasing income, or one-time cash settlements if they sell their property outright. At the same time, the projects don’t rile those who covet public lands—not just conservationists, but also hunters, anglers, off-roaders, and mining and military interests. “Here, if you put an environmentalist label on something,” says Oviatt, “you can actually damage the idea.”

I

t’s a few minutes before 7 a.m. in downtown Bakersfield, and the public services building seems deserted. I apologize to the security guard for being early and explain that I’m waiting for Oviatt to arrive. “Oh, she’s already in her office,” the guard informs me. “She’s always the first one here.” (This is impressive, considering that Oviatt commutes 75 miles each way from her home in Rosamond.)

Oviatt appears with a big, toothy grin from around a corner and flitters across the tiled floor. She is wearing a scarlet blazer adorned with an intricate gold poinsettia brooch, black blouse and skirt, and silverframed glasses. “I’m glad you could come now,” she says, “because we have back-to-back holiday parties all day, and then I’m going caroling.”

Though she’s been with the county for 13 years, her office appears as if she’s still moving in (or out). Transparent plastic storage containers, stacked three high and two rows deep, are shoved against the walls.

“Those are projects awaiting approval,” she explains.

Oviatt, a native of South Florida, attended Baldwin-Wallace College, a small liberal arts school in Berea, Ohio, earning a bachelor’s degree in philosophy and sociology. Her first job was for a manufacturing company buying up warehouse space in Los Angeles; later she worked for a housing developer. “I have a very unusual background for government,” she says. “Most people go into it straight from school. People of my generation have been here 30 years and are already retiring.” But

Oviatt got her master’s in public administration just three years ago, taking night courses at California State University in Bakersfield. “I was going to go into academics,” she says.

“But I realized what I truly enjoyed was figuring out how we make decisions in society, how people come to an agreement in this messy business we call democracy.”

Most planners enter the profession because they are “fascinated by the future,” Oviatt says. “They lose that fascination when they get beaten down by reality. But I am an idealist—that’s why I get up in the morning—and I tell younger planners never to doubt someone’s dream, even if it sounds fanciful.”

To underscore her point, she tells me about the time she put together the permit application for the Mojave Air & Space Port.

“When they first came in and told me they wanted to create a space port, I thought, ‘Well, now I’ve heard it all.’ But then I said, ‘Okay, I’m game.’ ” The project won Oviatt a national award for planning design, and today the port has become a global hotbed for private space entrepreneurs. “I am a synthesizer,” she says, “and I try to stay ahead of the curve, always thinking about what kind of community we will have in 50 years if we make this or that decision today.”

At the moment, however, the focus of the nine-member special projects team she leads is to wade through an avalanche of applications for renewable energy projects. A critical component of the process is navigating the stringent conditions of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA). “On the one hand, we’ve had all these wonderful places saved [by CEQA],” says Oviatt. “On the other hand, our state is bankrupt and businesses are fleeing.” Not wanting this to happen in Kern, Oviatt studied CEQA until she could quote it from memory.

Many say she’s become the leading CEQA expert in the county, and in doing so has turned something that developers elsewhere in California have abhorred and feared into just another step toward getting their projects approved. “Her base knowledge of the CEQA process is huge,” says Linda Parker, executive director of the Kern Wind Energy Association. “But she goes further and tries to understand our industry, and understand everybody else’s concerns. That’s what unique about her. She has a 360-degree view.”

In addition to wind, solar power is another big priority. “I spend three days a week meeting with solar proponents,” Oviatt says.

“There is a solar rush going on because of the money Washington spring 2 0 1 0

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taking off has put together in tax credits.” To qualify for A photovoltaic the federal credit, a solar project has to be under array sits near a construction by the end of 2010. Yet the flood of runway at Bakersfield’s Meadows applications didn’t show up in Oviatt’s office until Field airport. late 2009. “The industry is a little disorganized,” she complains. “They don’t understand that an environmental impact review [required by CEQA] takes up to 24 months.” Oviatt has met with more than 65 developers interested in new solar projects. But she didn’t want the tough environmental standards to scare off investors. “So we decided to do all the reviews simultaneously, rather than stacking people based on when their application came in. It’s a monumental task that I’m not sure we can pull off, but we’re going to try.”

To further speed things up, Oviatt steers solar firms away from public lands: “I tell them I’m not confident I can move it as fast because I have to coordinate with the [federal] Bureau of Land Management, which is already overwhelmed.” But there are multiple motives at play. “We believe the purpose of public land is the conservation of species,” she says. “Our board of supervisors doesn’t want to see the entire desert paved over with solar projects. Instead, our strategy is that we should use marginal private lands, lands that can’t be farmed and haven’t been turned into habitat. This is a way to recoup some use of the property without building a 5,000-unit subdivision on it. And if you use up all your public land for renewable energy, species conservation is going to move to private land, and then those private lands will be taken off the tax roll and unavailable for development.”

Jeff Roberts is a solar developer for a company called Granville Homes, which owns land in Kern County. He has applied for a permit to create a 6,000-acre photovoltaic installation in the southwest corner of the San Joaquin Valley. If completed, it would generate between 500 and 700 megawatts. This would make it one of the largest solar farms in the world, generating enough power for more than 100,000 homes.

“We’ve scratched our heads about what to do with this land,” Roberts says. “We’ve had it for five years and never grown anything on it because there is no water. Kern County has been very aggressive to move us through the process. They’ve been very smart and up to speed, more so than other counties I’ve worked with.”

While Oviatt loves lucrative renewable projects, she also staunchly protects Kern’s long-established sources of revenue. She reminds me that oil is a $10 billion industry in Kern County, which has more oil than any other in California, churning out one-tenth of all U.S. production from three of the five largest fields in the country. On the top shelf behind her desk is a sample of Kern crude encased in Lucite. She hands it to me to inspect. “We have a number of ordinances to protect oil. There are billions of gallons of oil underneath Los Angeles that can never be recovered because it’s been paved over. We haven’t done that here. You can drive into the parking lot of the Rosarito restaurant and there is an oil well, appropriately sited and pumping away.”

In Kern, oil is king, but the military is a hardy second. “The Department of Defense is a $3 billion industry,” Oviatt says. “A few years ago, the wind industry wanted to build towers over 400 feet. So we said, ‘Time out.’ We didn’t want to permit a wind project that would

the large-scale capital investments needed for this infrastructure can’t be uprooted if the business climate sours

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destroy a flight test corridor.” Her department uses a color-coded map system to aid wind developers in choosing appropriate sites.

Within a red zone, the DOD has to sign off on any turbine more than 80 feet tall. Yellow areas can have towers up to 500 feet. Green means anything goes. When Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s office published a handbook on how to protect military interests that compete with other types of development, it identified the red/yellow/green system as an exceptional example of innovative planning policy. “It’s been nationally recognized by the Department of Defense,” says Oviatt. “We’ve also commented to the Department of the Interior, and they put provisions in their environmental impact studies for energy development to take the military into account.”

“In most jurisdictions, a developer rolls into town and takes out a big ol’ topo map and just goes out to get leases,” she says. “They never talk to the planners. I didn’t want that happening here. So now I spend a lot of time in pre-application meetings where I sit down with people and explain how the process works, and I tell them, ‘Follow these constraints and it’ll roll along much faster.’” Befuddling potential investors with a barrage of intractable and byzantine bureaucratic hurdles is counterproductive, she says. “We think of ourselves as facilitators, not regulators. The developers financing these projects want certainty—they want to know what the rules are—and they get pretty upset when they get a year into a project only to find out they picked the wrong piece of property.” The point is to attract wealth to Kern County, not repel it.

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MAP BY JOE LEMONNIER

hile in Bakersfield, I attend a county board of supervisors meeting where Oviatt presents the members with a formal request to approve a 720-megawatt wind power project. It involves 17 landowners and 320 turbines, built on 9,300 acres at a cost of $1 billion. It could net the county $1 billion in revenue, 230 temporary construction jobs, and 30 permanent positions. The developer, Terra-Gen Power, is based in San Diego. Its vice president for lands and development, Ken Wagner, tells me, “From a regulatory side, Kern County has evolved quickly and is well suited for wind development, more so than other counties.”

The meeting begins promptly at 2 p.m. in the board chambers, a stately room paneled in cherrywood. Wagner, who has driven from San Diego to attend, takes a seat in the back row. The audience, about 90 people, is a mishmash that includes overalled ranchers, dark-suited investors, octogenarian landowners, reporters, engineers, and consultants.

Oviatt launches into a polished and highly orchestrated 45-minute presentation that she tells me later took her more than a year to prepare. On an overhead projector she unveils maps and diagrams and aerial photos. When she’s finished, a sundry parade of citizens approaches a central lectern to profess their support or voice their objections. When the detractors talk, Oviatt rummages frantically through file folders, yanking out various documents and transparencies. She is formulating her rebuttal. Several landowners who live near the proposed turbines fear that ice will form on the rotor blades and rain a lethal volley of frozen spears onto their property. A nervous mother says that sun glinting off spinning rotors creates a strobe effect that will be detrimental to her epileptic daughter. A retiree wants to know if the turbines will spook the jackrabbits he enjoys hunting. One couple asks if two towers can be relocated to preserve their backyard view; another pair is worried about noise pollution from humming turbine motors. And this drags on for hours.

Oviatt is cunning and whip smart, and to watch her in action is a lesson in tenacity. She politely but methodically addresses each concern with an arsenal of data—environmental reports, expert testimony, geologic surveys, wildlife habitat studies, even a last-minute stick-figure drawing she scribbles on a legal pad to illustrate the positioning of three towers under dispute. Not everybody is satisfied, and the board doesn’t want to steamroll its constituents. A recess is called, and Oviatt disappears, with posse in tow, to hash out a deal between contentious landowners and representatives from Terra-Gen.

An hour later she emerges with an agreement, and the board approves the project unanimously. Wagner is thrilled. “We should be able to begin construction in early 2010,” he says. Also pleased is Bruce Shafer, plant manager for CalPortland, which makes cement and construction materials. His company is the largest private landowner in the Terra-Gen project and will earn hefty royalties from the more than 150 turbines planned for its 5,500-acre property. And like the majority of these contracts, this one costs the landowner nothing.

The Terra-Gen agreement is just one of dozens Oviatt and her staff have helped craft since 2006, when she became chief of the special projects division. In the late 1980s, the county created a “wind energy zoning” (WEZ) ordinance to streamline the siting of turbines. Oviatt has learned to leverage the WEZ rules deftly. “Within the next 10 years we will see a 40 percent increase in installed wind power,” says Linda Parker. “We are going to go up to between 4,500 and 6,000 megawatts of capacity. New wind energy development is expected to be worth about $4.5 billion, which will increase property tax assessments by over $45 million. It’s like free money to the county.”

Until recently, wind energy investment in Kern was stagnant because its aging transmission lines were maxed out. But Kern’s special projects group worked with Southern California Edison to secure a $2 billion upgrade to transmission infrastructure. By 2013 nearly 250 miles of new high-voltage lines will deliver electricity from wind farms in Kern County to three million homes in the Los Angeles basin.

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orelei epitomizes the kind of person we’re going to depend on to make the transition from oil to renewables,” says Johanna Wald, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council. Wald is impressed by how Oviatt “innovatively encourages the use of private lands, going to degraded properties that have a lower habitat value and are close to the transmission infrastructure.”

“For me it’s all about the big picture—it’s jobs for solar installers, jobs for energy efficiency,” Oviatt says. And jobs for oil, too. During my conversations with her, I repeatedly try to peg Oviatt as an environmentalist on a mission to green her county, but she won’t have it: “Sure, it’s true we want to lessen our effect on the planet. I hate plastic bags, and if I can’t find Kern County grapes, I go without. But I live in a practical world where there have to be trade-offs. And on the front lines of my job, I watch and participate in these hard trade-offs.”

She goes on, “I have been offered jobs in a lot of other places with more money and more prestige. But I think that Kern County is one of the most fascinating places to work because of these opportunities to come up with innovative and creative ways to do good land planning.” A chief ambition is “to bring prosperity to the county and still get greenhouse gas reductions.” Her focus on renewables is especially savvy because it secures payback over the long haul. The infrastructure—grid connections, wind and solar installations, gas pipelines—demands large-scale capital investments that can’t be uprooted and relocated if the business climate suddenly sours.

Meanwhile, what continues to excite her about her job is balancing the demands of a society rooted in private property rights—“where you can still buy the American dream, a half-acre lot with a picket fence”—with the need to protect a greater public trust. “What I try to get [landowners] to understand is this: ‘You give up some of the rights spring 2 0 1 0

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on your land so we can breathe clean air; I give up some of the rights on my land so my kids can see a kit fox or California condor.’ I am always trying to find that balance where everything can coexist.”

Touring the county, I find plenty of examples of the kind of renewable-friendly policy making that has made Oviatt and Kern legendary among green energy developers: the conversion of a 44-megawatt coal-fired power plant to biomass gasification; THE LONG VIEW Wind turbines a pilot project for sequestering two million tons of CO2 in stretch away to depleted oil fields; the state’s largest bio-diesel manufacthe horizon on turing plant; and a string of small methane operations on Oak Creek Road in Tehachapi. dairy farms, which feed directly into Pacific Gas & Electric’s existing natural gas pipelines. The innovation here, typical of Oviatt, is obtaining a CEQA exemption that allows local connections to the PG&E pipeline to be laid beneath roads, across private property, and through existing county easements.

“Lorelei was instrumental in drafting legislation that would grant the exemption,” says David Albers, founder of BioEnergy Solutions, which is building the bovine methane facilities in Kern. “As an environmental lawyer who has practiced CEQA throughout the state for 10 years, this is the only time I have seen a planner take such huge steps for a particular type of project.” Planners in other California counties—San Bernardino, Solano, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Barbara—have sought Oviatt’s advice. “They want to know how we’ve streamlined our permitting process,” she says. And she is frequently tapped to speak at national industry conferences. “In local government there is a lot of talk about renewables but not a lot of action,” she says. “It’s hard to turn the ship fast. So they’re often looking for examples of what works and what doesn’t.”

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he sun has dipped behind Cache Peak and the sky begins its nocturnal shift from cerulean blue to ruby red to dusky violet. That afternoon, while driving through Jawbone Canyon, I watch construction crews assemble turbine towers in the “lay-down” area. In a clearing, 125-foot-long rotor blades are aligned like giant icicles. “I’ve always tried to be a good steward of the land,” Susan Hansen tells me. “And you won’t find a better steward of the land than a rancher, because we depend on it for our livelihood, and we like utilizing Mother Nature without hurting it, destroying it, or using it up.”

Without Kern County’s progressive WEZ rules, or the red/yellow/green mapping system, or the extensive upgrades to transmission lines, or a mandate to encourage renewable energy investment on private property, Susan might have lost her land to foreclosure long ago. Today, however, her daughter maintains a small cow operation on the ranch, while the Hansens enjoy the financial benefits from the wind. With the extra cash, the family, now in its fifth generation on the property, is building a 1,600-square-foot cabin for weekend and holiday getaways. It’s set in a wide saddle with a panoramic view of Cache Peak, where a plaque near the top commemorates her husband’s life. “Now more of our land is being developed for wind energy—five more turbines are being erected,” Susan says, “and I can just feel him up there approving.”

Michael Behar’s last article for OnEarth was our Spring 2009 cover story, “How to Sell the Sun.” With this issue, he joins us as a contributing editor.

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WATER’S

EDGE e x p l o r i n g n e w y o r k ’ s urban secrets photographs by diane cook and len jenshel text by robert sullivan

To know

New York, or at least to experience it, the tourists often start at Times Square, with its theaters and shows and chain restaurants that offer out-of-towners what they expect (and pay) to be surprised by—the hot dog, the bagel, the Broadway spectacle, in the intersection of glass and stone-covered skyscrapers. The native starts at the water.

Because if you want to get to the physical, historical, and even, I would argue, emotional essence of the city that is packed with eight million people, you head to the water’s edge, or edges—all 578 miles of them, all as close as they are far away. These are the places where New York, even if you think you know it, changes before your eyes, where the city seems less concrete and more dynamic, where you are never sure what is flora and what is fauna, or what is natural and what is not. past and present As is well known, the Arlington Marsh, on the shoreline of New York City northwest shore of Staten is back. Where did it go?

Island, lies at the confluence A quick synopsis: in the of the Arthur Kill and the Kill mid-1800s the waters of van Kull (kill is old Dutch for New York become a place riverbed or channel)—and at where swimming involves the confluence of old industry navigating trash and dead and original salt marsh. This animals, primarily horses, photograph, made in 2002, which are tossed in whole. captures a relic of the longThe shoreline is the place gone maritime economy. for docks, obviously, as well as sail makers, oystermen, printers, tanners, sailors, and the refuges of sailors. Sewage treatment begins around 1900, but the pace of sewage production (i.e., urban life) increases. Sewage treatment can’t keep up and is 4 6 onearth

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then overwhelmed by all the other things we begin to pump into the water, especially after World War II—namely, chemicals. At this point the water gets really bad, and the people who deal with it directly are those who have no choice: the powerless, the poor, and the marine industry, which begins to struggle, then nearly dies off.

In the 1960s comes, first, the idea that the river is polluted and, second, that it does not have to be. In the 1970s comes the Clean Water Act. In the 1980s, in response to the act, comes clean water. In the 1990s little creatures begin to jeopardize the wood in the old piers, a good problem as far as water quality goes, and the bigger creatures (i.e., us) begin to turn around and face the rivers and the harbor, the kills and the bay. It is a long and tortured story, but Westway, which was once to be the great modern interstate along the Hudson, on the West Side of Manhattan, became instead the Hudson River Greenway.

And yet still, to this day, no one really knows exactly what is on the water. No one has really explored all of the 578 miles, not even the Shorewalkers, who walk the watery circumferences of the city, who see a lot of the shore. (Their motto: “See New York at 3 m.p.h.”) Even the people who tell us about the edges in various official capacities and 4 8 onearth

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the forgotten island Just off the shore of the Bronx is North Brother Island, once home to an antebellum fever hospital and site of the wreck of the excursion boat General Slocum in 1904. More than a thousand people died in that blaze, a death toll not equaled in New York until 9/11. Now these invading vines reveal the Bronx’s surprising tropical side.

subsequently make bold plans for them may not be certain about what is there.

In fact, the 578 miles themselves are not a certainty. Municipal legend has it that it was Mayor John Lindsay who, in groping for the precise number of shore miles at some harried moment in the 1970s, asked his staff, who took string to map to come up with—quick—578!

into the

breach of visual, statistical, and other, more visceral awareness jumped Diane Cook and Len Jenshel, photographers who went, in some cases, where few New Yorkers had gone before. Cook and Jenshel are married, and although they have separate careers, they have worked together on many projects: photographing aquariums, volcanic hot spots, and, most recently, glaciers, floating on water, ethereal portraits of what, despite their solidity, seem like aboutto-vanish ghosts. Jenshel works in color and was a pioneer in what

is sometimes called the New Color Revolution of the 1970s. Cook works in black and white. They met in 1979; the story involves cannoli and an Italian pastry shop in Poughkeepsie, New York. They married in 1983 and began collaborating in 1991. Cook was born in New York City but grew up in Indiana, spending summers on the beach back in New York. Jenshel was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Queens. In 2002, Cook and Jenshel received a grant from the Design Trust for Public Space to document the city shoreline.

They came away from their initial forays feeling as if they had just seen new-found land.

“When we first started the project,” says Cook, looking through work prints one afternoon in the Flatiron District of New York, “we would show the pictures to friends who have lived their whole lives in New York, and they would say, ‘Where is this?’ ” “They would also say, ‘Where are the people?’” Jenshel adds.

“So that convinced us to do this,” Cook says.

This is a full-blown exploration of the city shorelines, and the result is a series of photographs that remind us of the importance of what we can’t see, of the importance of the edge, of those places that are not

THE WILDS OF BROOKLYN This glimpse of the abandoned Brooklyn Navy Yard shows a derelict pocket of New York’s most populous borough, just yards from an interstate highway. Once a bay (Wallabout) that was used as an anchorage for British prison ships in the Revolutionary War, the site prospered during World War II and then faded. Now photo studios and film sets are replacing the weeds.

quite water and not quite land, that are not inhabited but are not uninhabited either—places in between. In a time of binary operations, of developed or not developed, of land that is deemed either good or bad by the powers that decide, these photos taken together are a tonic of mesmerizing ambiguity, celebrations of the borders between New York City’s land and sea.

the urban

waterfront often seems dilapidated, but it is also being vigorously reinvented, in some cases by view-greedy developers and by politicians hoping to fund their campaigns with the money that, until the crash, was associated with builders of luxury condos and pricey hotels. But in other cases the landscape is being redeveloped by people who want to create sustainable futures, and the water’s edge is the place to see the importance of the relationship between cities and spring 2010

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sustainable ecologies. In a context of cities, nature is portrayed as the green shoot breaking through the concrete. The shoreline is a good place to see things reversed: humans are the living thing that always turns up on a shore, to fish, to drink, to stand and ponder. The sustainable future is in the reimagination of urban spaces, with special attention paid to the urban wilderness, or wildness, to use a Thoreauvian term.

The place where the water meets the land is always wild.

A few words on the methods of the photographers in filming the city’s terra incognita, on their littoral trials and tribulations. There were suspicions to deal with, of course, immediately following 9/11, when anyone out alone might be reported to the authorities, many of whom are not as interested in documentary photography as they perhaps should be. Being a photographer on the water in New York almost by definition means you are close to a bridge or marine facility; whereas standing on the water’s edge once could mean contemplation, now it is seen as suspect. Cook and Jenshel were eternal suspects. While working during the 2004 Republican convention, they were watched especially.

“People followed us around talking into their wrists,” Jenshel says.

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a distant prospect Staten Island is in New York and yet away from it, as this dreamscape view of Manhattan suggests. Here is the spine of the city as Henry David Thoreau might have seen it, minus a few million megawatts. Thoreau lived on Staten Island in 1843 and, in his journal, reveled in the mysteriousness of New York’s ocean and shores.

hostile situations,” recalls Cook.

The police weren’t the only hazards.

Newtown Creek is the tidal creek that separates Brooklyn and Queens and is emblematic of much of the waterfront: once rural, then overdeveloped, now regaining a foregone wildness that is as much about neglect as it is about the relentlessness of what we refer to as nature. This tidal creek was named for the town in the first settlements of Queens that was “new” around 1652. More recently, it has become known as the site of one of the world’s largest underground oil spills, about 17 million gallons, which is 6 million more than the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. (Even more recently, New York State has seen the return of a Colonial-era apple species, the Newtown pippin; Erik Baard, an author and environmental activist, identified its pedigree.) Jenshel and Cook photographed the creek after a rainstorm, or what is euphemistically called a stormwater event, which means the water slicks with chemicals, street runoff, and

the stuff from household sewers. The result was a beautiful color test of a photo by Jenshel, and three weeks of subsequent sickness.

despite the

health risks and wrist talkers, Cook and Jenshel’s results are celebrations of a mystical emptiness, painterly studies of the awkward but ultimately hopeful intersections between the man made and the non–man made. Taken as a whole, their work depicts a sometimes tropical waterfront, a place of interpersonal engagement as well as overgrown complexity. The waterfront of the husband-and-wife team is a place that disputes, in other words, the seemingly overwhelming rush of cement-fueled box store and parking lot sameness, the race to clean and park-ify all that is shore. Their work is a portfolio of secrets. There are quarantine stations, sites long abandoned, islands commandeered by vines. Like the photographs themselves, the vistas from Staten Island are a balm: it is an island which performs the valuable service of providing New Yorkers with perspective on the rest of the city, lest we forget that New York is a port, is an island chain, is (even before global warming raises the sea

the last resort A hundred years ago Staten Island’s Midland Beach was one of America’s finest resorts. Cornelius Vanderbilt had his summer mansion here, and excursion boats went out on the still-notcompletely-polluted seas.

Now, as it recovers from twentieth-century contamination, the place is haunted by memories.

level) nearly at sea. In highlighting broken reeds (the wetlands-destroying phragmites) and seemingly discarded vessels, their photos give a sense of the intimacy of these places, the spiritual importance of entropy. Broad Channel is the only inhabited island in Jamaica Bay, a wildlife refuge within the Gateway National Recreation Area. Houses are built on stilts. The feel of the place is, like the feel of City Island in the Bronx, more like Maine, or a fishing village on some other part of the New England coast.

Broad Channel and City Island are not fancy places. On City Island, the restaurant once owned by the late Tito Puente, timbales player extraordinaire, takes the place of a Starbucks. It is true that murders and innumerable other crimes have happened in our marshlands, but then so have untold moments of personal reflection, of stillness—moments of water- and sky-draped unmomentousness that purify the emotional watershed. Cook and Jenshel give us the ubiquity of sky spring 2010

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from shore and the joy of ruins, which take on the significance of religious artifacts in a city and a country that are wondering how to proceed industrially. In fact, plans for the waterfront were part of the reason they went to particular places to photograph.

At the beginning of the decade past, New York’s shoreline was full of places that had been marked for large-scale Olympic development. MANHATTAN TRANSFER These were places that the Olympic In this ruined building on hopefuls considered useless and dead Manhattan’s West Side, and of little or no value. (The Olympics trash was once transferred plan is currently dead itself.) from truck to barge to ocean “Some of what drew us to certain dumping ground. Now that places was, okay, this is going to be, dumping has been banned, say, an Olympic rowing place—well, the ruins can remind us that what is there now?” Cook recalls. the shore isn’t just something “It was annexation,” Jenshel says. to look at. We need to estabIn the end, this is what Cook and Jen- lish a new kind of working shel’s photos do. They assert a public relationship with the water. ownership and denote the valueless as valuable. The photographers are like explorers who, rather than claim the land for the king or queen, claim it for all, claim it for its trodden but still unspoiled beauty, claim it for reconsideration, perhaps, by you or me. Oftentimes the people who are already in the area don’t need much help in this regard. You don’t need a degree in urban planning to know that value is not necessarily added with nice hotels or ballfields made with plastic grass and black rubber dirt.

“At one of the meetings,” Jenshel says, “someone got up and they said, ‘You know, sometimes we just want to walk out on a patch of dust and sit out under a tree and that’s enough.’ And that really struck us.”

“I find those places beautiful,” Cook says.

“And transformational,” says Jenshel.

n r d c AND T HE B I G A P P LE ONEARTH SPOKE TO MARK IZEMAN, DIRECTOR OF NRDC’s New York urban program, which works to protect the nation’s largest metropolitan area. why should restoring the new york city waterfront be a top environmental priority?

For starters, it’s the greatest untapped area of open space in the city. The shoreline is longer than the entire coastline of Cape Cod, but historically much of it has been walled off from the public. Second, revitalizing the waterfront must also be seen as a key element in jump-starting the region’s new green economy. There are huge opportunities to create and preserve environmentally friendly industries, including the city’s historic maritime industry.

Mark Izeman talks more about NRDC’s work on New York CIty and its waterways at onearth.org/nycwaterfrontqa

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the essential engineer Why Science Alone Will Not Solve Our Global Problems

BY HENRY PETROSKI Alfred A. Knopf, 288 pp., $26.95

HOW TO FIX THE WORLD

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Are engineers better equipped than scientists to mend our planet? b y d a v id b erre b y

ife on a fault line should concentrate the mind, and make it

serious. If you want to build an office tower in California, for example, laws require that you make sure it will stand up to a major earthquake. Over the years the specifics change, as both building technology and seismic research advance, but the general principle endures: politics, technology, and science should work together to protect people’s lives.

Imagine, though, what earthquake preparedness would be like if it were handled the way American society deals with climate change. There would be little debate on the real choices ahead, but plenty of “debate” over the “alleged scientific proof” that earthquakes are actually real or that humans can do anything about them. Deniers would trot out one or two dissident seismologists to claim (falsely) that there is no scientific consensus. The reality-based community would take the bait and claim (falsely) that all scientists agree about everything. In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore states that there are 930 papers that agree on human-made climate change and zero that dispute it. But as the climatologist James Hansen recently noted, “That’s just not normal for science.”

Instead of pondering probabilities and degrees of confidence, we have allowed our deliberative processes to turn the world’s environmental crises into culture wars. Last December, for example,

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the biggest climate news concerned not scientists’ data but their stolen personal e-mails. As the sideshows go on, the risk of global catastrophe keeps rising.

The entire human population now lives on an environmental fault line. So why, when we debate what to do about global warming or long-term sustainability, can’t we sound like grown-ups?

In The Essential Engineer, Henr y Petroski of fers an answer. Americans, he suggests, are deluded about what science is and how it works. We want high-tech ways to cope with the risks of (to use a list of potential worldwide disasters that Petroski himself quotes) “a modern day global famine; an astronomical event leading to complete or partial extinction of life on Earth; a hundred- or thousand-year severe storm, earthquake or volcanic eruption; a terrorist attack that can kill tens or hundreds of thousands of people, or a climate change that could lead to total extinction of life on Earth.’’

Instead, Petroski argues, American politics and culture prepare citizens for a fantasy world in which science eliminates all uncertainty, predicts the future perfectly, and provides technical solutions untainted by politics and money. “Conventional wisdom is that science is sure,’’ he writes.

“In fact that is often the way its findings are reported.’’ Of course, the actual language of science is nothing like this. Only crazy cult leaders tell their followers that the next big earthquake will strike at 8:14 a.m. on April 12, 2016.

The best scientists can do is to say there is a 46 percent probability that an earthquake with a

Suspension, 2000, courtesy of Robert and Shana ParkeHarrison

Reviews

wo r d s i m ag e s i d e as

7.5 magnitude will strike Southern California in the next 30 years, and a “greater than 90 percent certainty’’ that human activities drive global warming.

Those are impressive intellectual achievements, and we should be glad to fold them into policy debates. Instead, we want scientists to act like cult leaders. How did that happen?

The role of theoretical physics in the development of the atomic bomb, Petroski believes, led us astray. For a few decades during and after World War II, with physicists “almost running amok in political influence,’’ it really did

seem that abstract, all-knowing science was the root of progress, both for our understanding of nature and our ability to make airplanes, cell phones, and other useful stuff. In reality, knowledge more often flows from material progress. “The rocket came before the mathematical solution to the problem of rocket flight,” Petroski notes. “Inventors seldom have the patience of scientists.’’

From steamships to pasteurization to refrigeration to the ear thquake-resistant Golden Gate Bridge, the typical history of invention belongs to practical people trying to make things that

we can use, building on what has come before. Revolutionary leaps are rare, unintended consequences ever-present, and a certain amount of failure is inevitable. Indeed, Petroski writes, it is failure that teaches inventors how to improve.

The people plodding along this path don’t refine beautiful theories or wait for perfect insights. They just get things done. Approvingly, Petroski quotes a “frequently cited” definition of structural engineering: “the art of assembling materials whose properties we do not fully understand into arrangements we cannot fully analyze to

s p o t l i g h t

Life University of California Press, $39.95 In its variety and drive to persist, life offers no end of surprises.

Consider the Belizean bulldog bat, one of the dozens of organisms profiled in Life: Extraordinary Animals, Extreme Behavior, the companion volume to the Discovery Channel/BBC series.

With its powers of echolocation, the bat can detect small fish just below the surface of a river and, using feet like grappling hooks, snatch them from the water. The seeds of Alsomitra metacarpa, a climbing gourd from Borneo, are the envy of aircraft designers. Each seed rests inside what looks like the transparent wing of a butterfly; it glides on the breeze, soaring, diving, and soaring again. Life is a carnival of marvels: African cheetahs to Antarctic sea anemones; dragon’s-blood trees to Komodo dragons. Earth is home to millions of species, of course, each the embodiment of eons of struggle and adaptation. In limiting its focus to a relative few, Life provides a detailed—and panoramic—study of the biodiversity we must protect.

support loads we cannot fully predict—and to do so in a convincing enough fashion so that the public has complete confidence in the resultant structures.’’

The driver of progress, then, isn’t pure science (which often brings up the rear, advancing thanks to the new instruments and data created by the practical inventors). It’s engineering, broadly defined as the business of making things people can use out of what is available, with whatever knowledge is at hand, and accepting the constraints of politics, money, and human nature.

“Engineers do not need to imagine the unimaginable,’’ Petroski writes. “They have to imagine the manageable.’’

As a claim about the history of progress, this is an extreme position in a long-standing debate.

(Do new machines foster new thought, or does new thinking lead to new machines? Surely it’s a little of both.) And Petroski, a professor of civil engineering at Duke University who has written 15 books (counting this one) that explain the engineer’s mind-set, lays it on thick. In The Essential Engineer, scientists merely know, but engineers do. Petroski’s scientists are passive and innately pessimistic, content to study nature and think their impractical “out of this world’’ thoughts. But engineers are active, upbeat, and always useful. After all, Petroski writes, while scientists “tend to be more flamboyant than engineers’’ and “sometimes appear to think of themselves as special,’’ it’s the engineers who, though they have “few if any literary allusions or plays on words in their work,’’ are “in a position to change the world, not just study it.’’ If this makes Petroski sound as if he has a chip on his shoulder, let me hasten to clarify: it’s a boulder, and it makes him, and his argument, look small.

The peevish tone is unfortunate, because the book makes a valuable point. Engineering as

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re v ie w s

Petroski describes it is the human side of our science-based civilization. It involves all the mess and strife from which we dream that pure science is immune: incomplete knowledge, insufficient budgets, political trade-offs, fads, fears, and foibles. When we forget all this, we end up expecting inhuman perfection from scientists.

We want to know exactly how climate change is happening and precisely what we can do about it.

Hence the sorry state of climate politics: if you believe science can know everything, then the slightest uncertainty or disagreement can make science look like it doesn’t know anything.

People who think too much of science, in other words, will end up thinking too little of it. So Petroski is right to encourage an engineer’s grown-up perspective.

But he goes too far, and it’s not just in his self-indulgent grousing about the “separate and unequal’’ professional relationships of scientists and engineers. The Essential Engineer isn’t an argument for correcting the imbalance; it’s a call for reversing it.

On climate change, for example, Petroski believes we’ve had too much study and not enough action. It’s not enough for scientists to do science, he says; they should also do engineering, or let the engineers do it themselves: “Scientists should either hand the problem over to engineers or engage not only in science relevant to climate change but also in engineering means to control it.’’ But global warming is exactly the kind of problem for which his get-it-done, use-what-we-know solutions could be disastrous.

Like any good engineer, Petroski wants to plan our actions on global warming by adding up the dollars and cents and using what knowledge we have. After 5 6 onearth S prin g 2 0 1 0

all, “engineering is all about designing devices and systems that satisfy the constraints imposed by managers and regulators.’’ That leads him to accept without question the supposedly hardheaded, by-the-numbers reasoning of Bjørn Lomborg, the Danish political scientist who claims society should spend its scarce resources on problems other than climate change. Petroski quotes Lomborg as saying that “spending an extra dollar cutting CO2 to combat climate change generates less than one dollar of good, even when we add up all the economic and environmental benefits.’’ These numbers have been disputed by economists, but there’s a larger problem with this kind of analysis: it works only if we can be certain we know exactly how much good will result in 2030 from a choice made in 2010. In other words, it assumes that past experience is a good guide to the future.

Petroski, eager to accept the constraints imposed by managers and regulators, buys that premise without question. But climate scientists, whose discipline gave us the term “butterfly effect,’’ know that the planet’s natural history is nonlinear. Sudden shifts in global climate have occurred out of all proportion to their causes, and in those times the past was no guide to the future at all.

Before we try to engineer the climate, then, it’s probably a good idea to learn more about what could go wrong. Hence, we’re lucky we still have some people pursuing impractical knowledge instead of just making better refrigerators at a better price.

Petroski prefers doing to knowing; he wants to roll up his sleeves and start geo-engineering. But a society that takes his advice to heart could end up not knowing what it’s doing. david berreby writes the Mind Matters

blog at bigthink.com and is the author of Us and Them: The Science of Identity (University of Chicago Press).

lives of THE trees

By Diana Wells Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 336 pp., $27

One of my earliest child-

hood memories is of the Helderberg Workshop, a summer camp I attended in rural Voorheesville, New York, when I was about 5 years old. My recollections are mostly fuzzy images of musty tepees and damp woodlands, but I also learned some vital life lessons: “Three Blind Mice” is the best song to play on the recorder, boys with a fondness for spearing millipedes with sticks are to be avoided, and birch bark makes for excellent drawing paper.

These memories returned while I was reading a delightful four-page chapter on the birch tree in Diana Wells’s Lives of the Trees. It is just one of many dozens in the book, all of about the same length and organized alphabetically, each exploring the history of man’s relationship with a different tree.

Birch trees immediately come across as far more useful than any of the trees starting with the letter A, as well as the early Bs. Their nuts are edible, their sap can be made into beer, and their bark is good not only for writing and drawing (Jefferson once suggested that field notes were better taken on weatherproof birch bark than on paper) but also for making clothing, canoes, and

huts. In the event of a nuclear winter, birch would be a handy tree to have around.

Wells invites this sort of mental meandering, as she advances neither a single story line nor a focused argument. Instead, she leads the reader on an amiable tour of individual trees and their contributions to human civilization: spices, quinine, tea, coffee.

Wells’s review of coffee’s history offers surprising details, including a note that the French novelist Honoré de Balzac is said to have drunk 60 cups a night. Only then, he claimed, would his ideas come “marching into his mind ‘like battalions.’ ” Another compelling chapter, on the cinchona tree, includes an unexpected primer on the origin of the gin and tonic. The key ingredient in tonic water is quinine, the first antimalaria drug, which is derived from cinchona bark. The curative powers of the bark were known to Europeans by the middle of the seventeenth century, after a Spanish countess was given it in powdered form while suffering from malaria during a trip to South America, where the tree is native.

After 1820, when two French scientists isolated quinine from the bark, the natural remedy began to change the course of history. Seeds were clandestinely ferried out of Bolivia and sold to the Dutch, who established a cinchona monopoly in Java, thereby cementing their dominance in the trade of various valuable tree products, including cinnamon from Sri Lanka and cloves from the Spice Islands. But the Brits best used it to their advantage.

“Once quinine was available and relatively cheap,” Wells writes, “Europeans could live in places that had previously been ‘the white man’s grave.’ They could also dose their workers and exploit places that had been inaccessible….Who knows how history would have differed without quinine, dutifully drunk

each evening in tonic (mixed with gin) as the sun set around the world.”

Not all chapters of Lives of the Trees are created equal. Wells’s history is more encyclopedic than narrative, and her prose is more languid than lyrical, which makes some chapters a bit of a slog­—namely, those that focus too heavily on the derivation of a particular tree’s name. In the end, what makes the book special isn’t of Wells’s making at all.

The true delight comes not from the party trivia you’ll amass but from the memories, etched in the mind’s own birch bark, that a small detail will bring suddenly back into view—another reminder of how trees shape who we are without our really thinking about it.

— l a u r a wri g ht

The immortal life of henrietta lacks

By Rebecca Skloot Simon & Schuster, 320 pp., $25

illustration by blair thornley

In 1951, an impoverished

young black woman named Henrietta Lacks developed a case of cervical cancer so vicious that, 50 years later, her attending physician still remembered the tumor. Before the woman died in the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital, scientists collected a tissue sample from the

mass and put it in a lab dish. For years they had tried and mostly failed to grow human cells in culture. To their amazement, Lacks’s cells grew and divided, grew and divided; fed the proper nutrients, they doubled relentlessly every 24 hours. To this day, “HeLa” cells are wildly popular for research on everything from cancer drugs to environmental toxins. As Lacks’s daughter Deborah tells the journalist Rebecca Skloot, “Them cells are still livin’ today, still multiplyin’, still growin’ and spreadin’.”

The reader learns all this and much more thanks to Skloot’s remarkable reporting in The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, which tells the full story of these cells: from the obscure life of their tobacco-farmer originator, to the laboratories around the world where the cells live on, to their legacy for the Lacks family today. We all have HeLa cells to thank for their role in developing the polio vaccine, in vitro fertilization, gene mapping, and drugs to treat AIDS, among many other advances.

They have also played a critical role in the rise of environmental medicine by broadening our understanding of how factors outside the body affect our individual health. HeLa cells were used to document how gamma rays and an endless stream of toxins, hormones, and environmental stressors assault human cells and DNA. The field of toxicology is rapidly changing, and HeLa has been there every step of the way. Researchers are now looking beyond how external agents cause obvious DNA mutations to discover how our environment triggers epigenetic changes—that is, how genes in “normal” DNA can be turned off and on in ways that make us behave differently, metabolize differently, and become ill in much sneakier fashion.

Skloot is particularly concerned with the human story

behind HeLa and the ethical issues it raises. Lacks never gave permission for her cells to be used in research, and for decades her children had no clue that a part of their mother was still very much alive. While biotech and pharmaceutical companies made billions from selling HeLa or the drugs made possible by HeLa cells, many of Lacks’s human descendants suffered, with no health insurance, from undertreated medical conditions. Even today, as Skloot notes, medical patients have surprisingly few legal rights when it comes to their tissue samples, which may be stored without consent and then used for research, even when those tissues contain genetic information with the potential to generate enormous profits.

In a world where genes are now patented, living tissues become one more commodity.

In the story of HeLa, Skloot has unearthed a fascinating— and landmark—instance of the way in which environmental ethics and medical ethics overlap.

In effect, Skloot wonders aloud,

perhaps human cells should be treated not like garbage but like natural resources to be managed and respected.

In one moving scene, two of Lacks’s children meet Christoph Lengauer, a scientist at Johns Hopkins, who shows them what her “ethereal fluorescent green” cells look like under a microscope. Lengauer is the first medical professional to acknowledge aloud the shoddy way the family was treated. He tells them he thinks human cells should be handled like a Texas gusher: both the oil company and the landowner share the profits.

Other experts have suggested managing cells like intellectual property, with royalties going to the owner, while still others believe nature’s material should remain in the public domain for all to use.

At the very least, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks makes a strong case for the notion of informed consent, as our living tissues seed the rich new fields of genetic research.

— flore n c e willi a m s

Stars, Trainwhistles, Weeds The feel as a boy is that of floating with stars, lark buntings, prairie dogs, and pikas traveling the same road a long while just to meet us.

Skies then were veined and birdwinged as right now, while rainbow fish flew without moving over the beadwork in creekbeds.

Yet even back then I must have halfway overheard the distant trainwhistles shipping carloads of thumbs and big toes to the bottom of Egypt.

Oh, it takes a long time to arrive, longer far to inherit the territory. Anciently intricate weeds brush against us, ever since childhood and still we can’t name them.

—By Reg Saner

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Dispatches news and views from the natural resources defense council

Ohio decides coal is a bad deal

O

Clean-energy advocates and local citizens kill plans for a dirty power plant in the heart of coal country n September 17, 2007, Andrew Wetzler

walked into city hall in Oberlin, Ohio, to attend a meeting of the city council, fact sheets and presentation materials in hand. Earlier that year, Wetzler, an NRDC attorney, and other staff members from the newly formed Midwest office had fanned out to attend council meetings in nearly a dozen cities and towns across the state—from Oberlin to Westerville to Yellow Springs—to oppose the building of a new coal plant in Meigs County, in southeastern Ohio.

The 960-megawatt coal-fired plant, proposed by American Municipal Power (AMP), would emit seven million tons of carbon dioxide each year. It would also pollute the air and water by releasing particulate matter, which can contribute to asthma and other respiratory problems, and sulfur dioxide, which can lead to acid rain.

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“It was a bad deal—environmentally and economically,” says Shannon Fisk, an attorney in the Midwest office.

AMP, an energy cooperative owned by its members—in this case, cities and towns across Ohio and neighboring states—wanted to finance the construction of the plant by locking member municipalities into long-term “take or pay” contracts. These contracts would require members not only to foot the bill for time to move on construction but also to commit to paying for the A 2004 news photo electricity the plant generated—no matter the shows a home, since demolished, near a cost. AMP assured its members that the plant coal-fired plant in Ohio. would be relatively cheap to build and operate and provide an affordable source of electricity. But in reality, projected construction costs were rapidly rising and the expected operating costs were increasing significantly as well, thanks to the prospect of

federal climate change legislation and new coal ash disposal rules, and a hike in the cost of coal.

At the city council meetings, NRDC staffers made the case that the economics of building a new coal plant didn’t make as much sense in the long term as other available alternatives, such as wind and solar. Initially it looked like a losing battle, as city after city signed up with AMP despite NRDC’s advocacy efforts. “We knew we were up for a challenge in the heart of coal country,” Fisk says.

But in the fall of 2009, as AMP was preparing to break ground, its contractors estimated that construction of the new plant would be more than 167 percent higher than the initial projection in 2005, rising from $1.5 billion to nearly $4 billion. At a committee meeting in November 2009, AMP’s Ohio members decided to cancel the plant.

Fisk believes that NRDC’s efforts laid the groundwork for community leaders to recognize a bad deal when they saw one.

“Our message all along was that the plant would cost too much and that there were better alterna-

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tives,” he says. “We were really the first ones to make this argument in Ohio.”

AMP’s plan for a new coal-fired power plant was one of 150 such proposals made during the Bush administration. As of today, 110 of them have been canceled.

“People are realizing that the economic future of energy is in efficiency and renewables, not dirty nineteenth-century coal,” says Fisk. NRDC is currently challenging another new coalfired plant proposal in Ohio.

Wetzler, who was living in Columbus in 2007, believes that having a presence in the Midwest helped NRDC achieve its goals.

“I think we would have received a far chillier reception if we had flown in from Los Angeles or New York and tried telling these folks what to do,” he says.

The decision to cancel the plant could ultimately prove a boon to AMP’s Ohio members on several fronts. “There’s a great opportunity to make better choices here,” says Thom Cmar, an NRDC staff attorney in Chicago. The plant was supposed to reduce members’ reliance on electricity from the wholesale market. But “saving energy through energy-efficiency programs is by far the cheapest option,” says Dylan Sullivan, an NRDC energy advocate in Chicago. Ohioans will not only save money by not building the plant; they will also have one less source of pollution and carbon emissions fouling their air and water.

“This is one more small step toward a sustainable energy future,” says Cmar. “If it wasn’t for our willingness to really jump in and fight this thing on the ground, it wouldn’t have happened.”

Fisk believes that the decision to cancel the new plant sends a message far beyond Ohio. “It’s one thing when a state like California decides not to build a coal plant,” he says. “But when a state in the heart of coal country decides not to do it—that’s a pretty strong statement.” —lindsey konkel

Country’s Vocal advocate

M

ountaintop removal, a destructive form

of coal mining that levels entire mountains to expose the seams of coal within, has already destroyed more than one million acres of once-majestic Appalachian landscape and threatens the health of the people living there. Mining companies dump trees, debris, and toxic contaminants from destroyed mountains into nearby streams and valleys, polluting drinking water and devastating natural habitats. Country music legend and longtime NRDC supporter Emmylou Harris, a founding member of NRDC’s Music Saves Mountains campaign, discusses how she and other artists are working to keep the “country” in country music. You can learn more at musicsavesmountains.org.

What inspired Music Saves Mountains?

Bluegrass, mountain music, and the country music that’s popular today—you can really trace it all back to the Appalachians, the people who settled there, and the instruments they used. In a sense, this is the mother ground from which this music came. It’s really important that these artists—musicians from different areas of music, but above all country music—understand the terrible desecration that’s happening in the Appalachians, especially in West Virginia and Kentucky. Beyond destroying the environment and the wildlife, mountaintop removal is devastating the people who live on the land. It’s something that should be stopped—stopped yesterday. Once people Strumming for a cause Emmylou Harris holds a Music Saves Mountains guitar custom-made for her by Gibson. realize that this is going on in their backyards, I do think there’s a good possibility that things will change. But we need to mobilize.

Which of the songs that you perform best expresses your feelings about this place?

There’s a song called “The Green Rolling Hills of West Virginia” [by Utah Phillips], which is a poignant story about people who had to leave that area. It was written a long time ago, before mountaintop removal mining, but I hope that when I perform it, it will give me an opening to raise awareness.

What inspires your personal passion for the environment?

It’s where we all live! I saw a great bumper sticker once on a vehicle in Nashville. It said, “We all live downstream.” Anything that’s done, anywhere in the world, can have negative consequences for everyone.

We need to be aware that we’re caretakers of this extraordinary world that we live in.

—crystal gammon

Spring 2010

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BETWEEN THE LINES

Keeping Us Safe From Toxic Chemicals

Of the nearly 80,000 chemicals on the market today, only 200 have been tested for harmful effects. On September 29, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Lisa Jackson released a set of principles that will guide the much-needed reform of the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 and increase public confidence in the safety of chemicals that are produced and used in the United States.

The process of risk assessment has a checkered history.

Some chemicals have been bogged down in the process for decades, despite clear evidence that they are dangerous.

Meanwhile, people are still being exposed and harmed.

We should have a quicker pathway to reduce human exposures to the most hazardous chemicals.

Linda Greer Public Health, D.C.

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The requirement to consider costs could be a stumbling block to protecting sensitive groups, such as children. Other health laws, such as the Clean Air Act, explicitly state that health comes first. It’s okay for the EPA to consider costs, but an analysis that pits children’s health against economic interests would be a real mistake.

Gina Solomon Public Health, San Francisco

There are dozens of chemicals we already know are bad for the public, the environment, or both. Think asbestos. For a long time, the EPA has been unable to ban most of its uses because of hurdles in the law. The EPA needs to be able to restrict or eliminate the use of chemicals that a lot of people are exposed to and that we know are dangerous.

Daniel Rosenberg Public Health, D.C.

Currently, there are no incentives for chemical manufacturers to develop so-called green chemicals—chemicals that are designed to be nontoxic to our health and to the environment. To create these incentives will be good not only for the economy but also for public health.

Sarah Janssen Public Health, San Francisco

Drop by Drop With mounting pressure on

the planet’s freshwater supply, many regions, including the western United States, are seeing their traditional sources of water dry up. “We’ve already tapped all of our major water supplies,” says Doug Obegi, an attorney with NRDC’s western water project.

“Rather than taking more water out of actual rivers, California has created a ‘virtual river’” through efficiency, recycling, and projects such as roadside gardens and green roofs, which help filter stormwater and preserve groundwater quality.

The virtual river got a big boost last November, when Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a law setting the nation’s first statewide water-efficiency goals. The legislation, championed by NRDC, aims for a 20 percent average per-capita reduction in water use by 2020 throughout all of California’s urban water districts.

Some of the new efficiency measures will be quite simple, Obegi says. Charging for water by volume, for example, can increase efficiency dramatically.

Some water districts plan to meet the goal by offering rebates on water-efficient clothes washers, showerheads, and toilets, as well as incentives for landscaping with drought-resistant plants.

Water districts that don’t comply with the new law will be barred by the state of California from applying for grants and loans—a huge disincentive.

“Overall,” Obegi says, “this law gives us a lot of the tools we need to get started.”

—c.g.

left: Matt Greenslade (greer); above: 81A Productions/Corbis

reviewed emicals should be Ch : #1 e pl ci in sed on Pr dards that are ba an st ty fe sa t ns criteagai flect risk-based re d an e nc ie sc visound health and the en n ma hu of ve ti ria protec ronment.... ons management decisi sk Ri : #3 e pl ci bpopuPrin unt sensitive su co ac to in ke ta should bstitutes, ailability of su lations, cost, av . nt considerations and other releva A should facturers and EP nu Ma : #4 e pl ci both Prin iority chemicals, pr on t ac d an assess er. in a timely mann existing and new, ould be eneen chemistry sh Principle #5: Gr ansparions assuring tr is ov pr d an ed ag ould cour to information sh ss ce ac ic bl pu d ency an .. be strengthened..

t

SWITCHBOARD:// Online news analysis

http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/vrome/efficient_tvs_coming_to_califo.html Ever consider how much energy that flat-screen

TV in your living room consumes? A typical plasma television uses about 350 watts of power—nearly as much as your clothes washer. But that could soon change, says Victoria Rome, deputy director of California advocacy in NRDC’s San Francisco office. Last fall the California Energy Commission adopted the world’s most stringent energy-efficiency standards for televisions. All manufacturers selling TVs in the state will have to cut power use by a third by 2011, and by half by 2013. And because California constitutes a large share of the electronics market, many experts expect the standards to improve TV energy efficiency throughout the country. In her blog, Rome described the new choices that consumers will encounter when they go shopping.

Working for an environmental organization, I am accustomed to seeking out “green” products. This year I found several in unsuspected places.… Did you know you can buy a tricycle made of mostly recycled materials? We got one for my 2-year-

old. At many stores I find one section, albeit a small one, that offers environmentally friendly products that are either superefficient or are made out of recycled materials.... Even a recent visit to the eye doctor yielded a dozen choices of frames made from recycled material.

But what if every product met a strong environmental performance standard? That day has come to California for one of our most central household products, the television. The California Energy Commission’s efficiency standards for new televisions mean that, starting in 2011, every television sold in California will be an efficient one—so efficient, in fact, that once the standards are in full effect, California could put off building new power plants and will save almost $1 billion per year in the form of lower electricity bills. That’s the great thing about efficiency standards. They nudge manufacturers to innovate so that their products use less energy with no tradeoff in performance or availability.

show us your nature

EYE OPENER While hiking in the rainforest of Tortuguero National Park in Costa Rica, filmmaker Jay Schipper was lucky to catch a daylight glimpse of the nocturnal red-eyed tree frog. Its huge bright eyes are thought to startle predators, allowing the frog seconds to leap to safety. To send us your photos, visit onearth.org/photocontest.

China and Us Seven years ago, the lights

went out across vast swaths of China. Massive blackouts, like those in California in 2000 and 2001, left residents and businesses without power.

Among the regions hardest hit was Jiangsu Province, a growing industrial center north of Shanghai, whose skyrocketing—and inefficient—industrial and residential energy use was overtaxing its power grid.

Barbara Finamore, director of NRDC’s China program, recalls Jiangsu’s initial response to the energy conservation measures proposed by NRDC. “Ten years ago, they laughed,” she says. But then the blackouts hit, and Jiangsu’s leaders recognized pretty quickly the role that energy efficiency could play in stabilizing the province’s power grid—and its economy.

Jiangsu, with a population of 76 million, and California still have much in common. Each is a major economic engine in its country (Jiangsu’s economy accounts for 10 percent of China’s gross domestic product; California represents 11.5 percent of the U.S. GDP), and both are interested in developing cleaner sources of energy. Last October California and Jiangsu signed a formal agreement to promote cooperation between their governments, industries, and universities to boost energy efficiency and renewable energy use and to curb emissions.

This is the first time that such a deal has been struck between a Chinese province and a U.S. state with the specific aim of tackling climate change.

NRDC’s China program helped design the agreement’s basic framework and will continue to “help ensure that both California and Jiangsu stay on the right track,” says Mona Yew, the new director of the China energyefficiency program.

—c.g.

Spring 2010

onearth 6 1

fieldwork

wh o w e a r e

wh a t w e d o

well for the planet: she’s had a lot of backyards in her 35 years.

Jaiswal was born in India, but her family moved to the United States when she was just 3 years old, first to Dallas and then to Akron, Cleveland, and San Diego. By the time she was in high school, the Jaiswal family was settled in the Los Angeles area.

Since joining NRDC in 2001, Jaiswal has fought and won many local battles. First based in the organization’s Southern California office, she worked to protect and improve water quality in riv-

fensives, a colleague approached her about trying international work. “I was conflicted,” she says. “I really like working on local issues as a litigator.” But as she heard more, her choice became clear. NRDC was looking to start an initiative in India, through which it hoped to bring clean energy and efficiency technologies to a country undergoing tremendous development and modernization. As the country of her birth, it was a place full of import for her. She said yes.

Jaiswal had visited India sev-

Her own backyard Anjali Jaiswal proves the adage “Think globally, act locally.”

Home, sweet home An NRDC attorney protects the places she knows and loves, from Cleveland to Los Angeles to New Delhi

W

by josephine hearn

hen American Municipal Power

announced last fall that it had canceled plans to build a new coal-fired power plant in southeastern Ohio, NRDC and its allies rejoiced. For senior attorney Anjali Jaiswal, who had helped devise the legal strategy to fight the proposed plant, it was a particularly meaningful victory. She spent much of her childhood in Ohio—“I love Cleveland!” she readily exclaims—and the battle over the power plant represents what she values most about environmental law: the ability to make real change in her own backyard.

Jaiswal’s affinity for protecting the places she has called home bodes

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spring 2010

ers, streams, and coastal areas, waging battles that yielded immediate, tangible results.

Jaiswal and other members of NRDC’s California staff have also successfully advocated for upgrades to a sewage treatment plant on the central coast, where sea otters in Morro Bay were being sickened by the discharge of dirty water. She waged legal battles to strengthen water pollution controls and to stop dairies in Southern California from dumping waste into the Santa Ana River. In the Sacramento area, she helped win the fight to require that irrigation projects leave more water in ecosystems, shielding endangered fish populations from further degradation. “We said, ‘This is the law, this is the science. You have to rule for us,’ ” she remembers. “It was a lot of sleepless nights and hard, hard work, but we won.”

Last year, as Jaiswal was immersed in state and local legal of-

eral times as an adult. In 2005 she took a leave from NRDC and spent three months in New Delhi working on pollution control through the Nehru Fulbright Indo-American Environmental Leadership Program. She was gratified by how easily her knowledge transferred to a new setting, allowing her to help with a campaign to improve sewage treatment near the Ganges River. “I knew what sewage plants looked like, their operation, their energy issues,” she says. “I knew about compliance and enforcement.”

She also knew the country on a personal level, having visited relatives in her father’s village in Gujarat, India’s westernmost state, which shares a border with Pakistan. Her experiences there gave her a snapshot of the broad challenges India faces. One evening, she and a cousin walked out into the tobacco fields surrounding the village. Her cousin

Photograph for OnEarth by emily nathan

Some 80 percent of the infrastructure India will need by 2030 has yet to be built, and the number of motor vehicles on the road is expected to quadruple by 2020

wanted to show off the village’s new power plant—a sign of progress. Jaiswal couldn’t help but see the environmental repercussions of the emissions spewing from the towering smokestacks.

India and the United States have two important things in common: they have large Englishspeaking populations and are democracies, making collaboration easier than in other rapidly developing countries, such as China.

Though NRDC’s work in India is full of potential, Jaiswal says, the challenges that lie ahead are significant: some 80 percent of the infrastructure the country will need by 2030 has yet to be built, and the number of motor vehicles on the road is expected to quadruple by 2020. The environmental ramifications of India’s path forward will be felt around the world.

Jaiswal and Jacob Scherr, director of NRDC’s international program, launched the India initiative last June. Their goals include fostering U.S.-India cooperation on clean energy and climate, strengthening environmental compliance and enforcement, and incorporating energy-efficiency standards into building codes to reduce carbon emissions.

“One of the great challenges in India is that there are laws on the books that are not implemented or enforced,” Scherr says. “Anjali is in an excellent position to explain how we handle these problems in the United States and to translate her experiences to meet the needs in India.”

Jaiswal sometimes thinks back to her father’s village in Gujarat.

The memory she recalls is a hopeful one—that of a relative proudly leading her up to the roof to show off a new possession, the village’s first solar cookstove.

NRDC Board of Trustees

John H. Adams Founding Director, NRDC; Chair, Open Space Institute

Daniel R. Tishman Chair; Chair and CEO, Tishman Construction Corp. of New York

Richard E. Ayres The Ayres Law Group

Arjun Gupta Founder and Managing Partner, Telesoft Partners

Frederica Perera, Ph.D. Professor, Columbia University; Director, Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health

Henry R. Breck Partner, Heronetta Holdings, Inc., L.L.C.

Philip B. Korsant Managing Member, Korsant Partners, L.L.C.

Robert Redford Actor; director; conservationist

Anna Scott Carter Consultant, NRDC; environmentalist

Nicole Lederer Co-founder, Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2)

Laurance Rockefeller Conservationist

Susan Crown Principal, Henry Crown and Company; executive, foundation chairman, community activist

Maya Lin Artist/designer

Jonathan F. P. Rose President, Jonathan Rose Companies, L.L.C.

Shelly B. Malkin Landscape painter; conservationist

Thomas W. Roush, M.D. Private investor; environmental activist

Josephine A. Merck Artist; founder, Ocean View Foundation

Philip “Pete” Ruegger III Chair, Executive Committee, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, L.L.P.

Frederick A.O. Schwarz, Jr. Chair Emeritus ; Chief Counsel, Brennan Center for Justice; Senior Counsel, Cravath, Swaine & Moore, L.L.P. Adam Albright Vice Chair; Private investor; environmentalist Patricia Bauman Vice Chair; Co-director, Bauman Foundation Robert J. Fisher Vice Chair; Director, Gap, Inc. Alan Horn Vice Chair; President and COO, Warner Brothers Joy Covey Treasurer; President, Beagle Foundation

honorary trustees Dean Abrahamson, M.D., Ph.D. Professor Emeritus, Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota Robert O. Blake U.S. Ambassador (retired) Joan K. Davidson Former Parks Commissioner, N.Y. State; President Emerita, The J.M. Kaplan Fund

Laurie P. David Producer; activist Leonardo DiCaprio Actor; environmentalist John E. Echohawk Executive Director, Native American Rights Fund Bob Epstein Co-founder, Sybase, Inc.; Co-founder, Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2); organizer and director, New Resource Bank

Sylvia Earle, Ph.D. Chair, Deep Ocean Exploration and Research, Inc. James B. Frankel Attorney; conservationist Francis W. Hatch Trustee, John Merck Fund Hamilton F. Kean Attorney; conservationist Charles E. Koob Partner, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, L.L.P.

Michel Gelobter, Ph.D. Founder, CEO, Cooler, Inc.

Peter A. Morton Chairman/founder, 510 Development Corp.

Wendy K. Neu Senior Vice President, Hugo Neu Corp.; grassroots community organizer and activist

Burks B. Lapham Chair, Concern, Inc. Jonathan Z. Larsen Journalist Michael A. McIntosh, Sr. President, The McIntosh Foundation

Christine H. Russell, Ph.D. Environmentalist; foundation director William H. Schlesinger President, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies

James Taylor Singer/songwriter Gerald Torres Bryant Smith Chair, University of Texas Law School Elizabeth Wiatt Environmentalist; founder, Leadership Council George M. Woodwell, Ph.D. Founder, Woods Hole Research Center

John R. Robinson Attorney

Kirby Walker Independent film/ video producer

Nathaniel P. Reed Businessman; conservationist

Frederick A. Terry, Jr. Senior Counsel, Sullivan & Cromwell

Program Staff Wesley Warren, director; Advocacy: Lisa Catapano, Apolinar Gonzales, Erik Laaken, Andrea Martin, Robin C. McCarthy, Ann Notthoff, Robert Perks, Victoria Rome, Melissa Waage; Air & Energy: Dale Bryk, director; Evelyn Arevalo, Kaid Benfield, Terry Black, Pierre Bull, Lane Burt, Rita Calvo, Sheryl Carter, Ralph Cavanagh, Audrey Chang, Brandi Colander, Donna C. DeCostanzo, Amanda Eaken, Lara Ettenson, Deborah Faulkner, Rishi Garg, David Goldstein, Nathanael Greene, Kristin E. Grenfell, Ashok Gupta, Jennifer Heibult, Justin Horner, Noah Horowitz, Roland Hwang, Richard Kassel, Kit Kennedy, Noah Long, Deron Lovaas, Luis Martinez, Peter Miller, Simon Mui, Colin C. O’Brien, Colin Peppard, James Presswood, Laura E. Sanchez, Thomas Singer, Brian Siu, Rachel Sohmer, Luke Tonachel, John Walke, Sharianne Walker, Margaret Waltner, Devra Wang, Samantha Wilt; Center for Market Innovation: Sarah Brailey, Diane Doucette, John Hale, Jennifer Henry, Christine Luong, Sandra Lyutse, Yerina Mugica, Cai Steger, Andy Stevenson, Samir Succar, Jacqueline Wong; China: Barbara Finamore, director; Michelle BenDavid, David Cohen-Tanugi, Hoober Hu, Joan Hu, Gao Jie, Ruidong Jin, Hyoung Mi Kim, Ping Li, Yang Li, Yuqi Li, Zixin Lin, Mingming Liu, Zhengchun Mo, Jingjing Qian, Alex Wang, Sean Wang, Xiaoli Yan, Chenxi Yang, Mona Yew, Anne Zhang, Xiya Zhang, Yao Zheng; Climate Center: Daniel Lashof, director; David Hawkins, Patricia F. Sullivan Chair for Environmental Policy; Peter Altman, Christina Angelides, Jamie Consuegra, David Doniger, Jennifer Emerson, Antonia Herzog, Laurie Johnson, Elizabeth Martin, George Peridas, Theo Spencer, John Steelman, Lucy Swiech-LaFlamme; Government Affairs: David Goldston, director; Health: Linda Greer, director and George W. Woodwell Chair for Environmental Science; Dylan Atchley, Diane Bailey, Sarah Janssen, Jonathan Kaplan, Avinash Kar, Susan Keane, Kim Knowlton, Mayra Quirindongo, Daniel Rosenberg, Miriam Rotkin-Ellman, Jennifer Sass, Gina Solomon, Suzanne Vyborney, Monique Waples, Mae Wu; International: Jacob Scherr, director; Heather Allen, Elizabeth Barratt-Brown, Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, Cecilia Herrera, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Amanda Maxwell, Jake Schmidt, Elizabeth Shope; Land: Sharon Buccino, director; Johanna Wald, Leonard and Sandy Sargent Chair in Western Public Lands; Janet Barwick, Charles Clusen, Sylvia Fallon, Debbie Hammel, Nathaniel Lawrence, Amy Mall, Franz Matzner, Bobby McEnaney, Helen O’Shea, Rebecca Riley, Justin Sherman, Matthew Skoglund, Louisa Willcox, Craig Dylan Wyatt, Sami Yassa; Legislative Affairs: Richie Ackerman, Genevieve Parshalle, Scott Slesinger; Litigation: Mitch Bernard, director; Allison Clements, Thomas Cmar, Aaron Colangelo, Emily Davis, Elaina De Meyere, Ubaldo Fernandez, Anjali Jaiswal, Charles Koob, Selena Kyle, Ben Longstreth, Nancy Marks, Dustin Meyers, Michael Wall, Vivian Wang; Midwest Regional: Henry L. Henderson, director; Ann Alexander, Joshua Berman, Jennifer Daly, Shannon Fisk, Melissa Lupo, Nancy Metzger, Mollie Nye, Rebecca Stanfield, Dylan Sullivan, Nancy Watson, Andrew Wetzler; Nuclear: Christopher Paine, director; Thomas B. Cochran, Wade

Max Stone Managing Director, D.E. Shaw & Co., L.P.

Thomas A. Troyer Member, Caplin & Drysdale

John Sheehan United Steelworkers of America (retired) David Sive Sive, Paget & Riesel, P.C. (retired)

president Frances Beinecke eXECUTIVE Director Peter H. Lehner Deputy Director Patricia F. Sullivan

James Gustave Speth Professor of Environmental Policy, Brown University; Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies

Cruz Reynoso Professor of law, UC Davis

Daniel Pauly Director, Fisheries Centre, University of British Columbia

NRDC Staff

Wendy Kirby Schmidt President, The Schmidt Family Foundation; founder, The 11th Hour Project

Greene Chair for Nuclear Policy; Geoffrey Fettus, Matt McKinzie, Jonathan McLaughlin, Robert S. Norris; Oceans: Lisa Speer, director; Alison Chase, Sarah Chasis, Karen Garrison, Thomas Hayes, Lawrence Levine, Amy Macaux, Leila Monroe, Regan Nelson, Laura Pagano, Bradford Sewell, Lindsi Seegmiller, Lisa Suatoni; Science Center: Gabriela Chavarria, director; Susan Alter, Dylan Atchley, Tara Connelly, Nathan Sandwick; Urban: Mark Izeman, East Coast director, and Joel Reynolds, West Coast director; Lisa Copland, Linda Escalante, Jessica Esposito, Eric Goldstein, Lizzeth Henao, Allen Hershkowitz, Darby Hoover, Albert Huang, Michael Jasny, Taryn Kiekow, Adriano Martinez, Robin Marx, Damon Nagami, Melissa Lin Perrella, David R. Pettit, Penny Primo, Laurance Rockefeller, Richard Schrader, Kate Sinding, Steven Smith, Jessica Wall, Morgan Wyenn; Water: David Beckman, director; Ronnie Cohen, Jon Devine, Noah Garrison, Andy Gupta, Rebecca Hammer, Carol James, Michelle Mehta, Barry Nelson, Douglas Obegi, Katherine Poole, Monty Schmitt Communications Phil Gutis, director; Cathryn Bales, Ynés Cabral, Anthony Clark, Robert Deans, Alba Garzon, Lisa Goffredi, Sherry Goldberg, Courtney Hamilton, Elizabeth H. Heyd, Daniel Hinerfeld, Serena Ingre, Alexandra Kennaugh, Francesca Koe, Jessica Lass, Kathryn McGrath, Joshua Mogerman, Michael Oko, Jennifer Powers, Adrianna Quintero-Somaini, Kimberly Ranney, Auden Shim, Katherine Slusark, Suzanne Struglinski, William Tam, Benjamin West, Lisa Whiteman, Eric W. Young; onearth Douglas S. Barasch, editor-in-chief; George Black, Scott Dodd, Janet Gold, Jennifer Sta. Ines, Laura Wright Development John Murray, director; Jennifer Alley, Coretta Anderson, Priscilla Bayley, Natasha Berman, Spencer Campbell, John Cavanagh, Jennifer Chapin, Elizabeth Corr, Justin Courter, Lauren Craft, Lasans Crawford, Maria DeRiggi, Caitlin Driscoll, Sarah Edwards-Schmidt, Travis Eisenbise, Robert Ferguson, Katherine Gibson, Nancy Golden, Shari Greenblatt, Rita Itwaru, Patrick Kiely, Ying Li, Kelly McGonigle, Elizabeth McNulty, Peter Meysenburg, Michelle Mulia-Howell, Emily O’Neill, Shaniqua Outlaw, Caitlin Palmer, Matthew Perrin, Caroline Pronovost, Michelle Quinones, Carlita Salazar, Orlena Scoville, Lynne Shevlin, Missy Toney, Julie Truax, Catherine Vega, Nicole Verhoff, Desrene Walton, Marianna Weis, Joyce Wong; Membership: Linda Lopez, director; Jean Bowman, Darlene Davis, Lillian Fernandez, Amy Greer, Alex Hernandez, Katharine Houston, Jordan Kessler, Adrianne Prettyman, Gina Trujillo, Marie Weinmann, Joyce Yeung Finance and Operations Judith Keefer, director; Finance: Hiawatha Barno, Annette Canela, Chun Cheng, Dorothy Clune, Jeff Cruz, Kathy Eason, James Hands, Sharon Hargrove, Lauretta Hoffler, Eunice Jean-Paul, Alex Liu, Shih-Chang Lu, Apurva Muchhala, Vivek Nadarajah; Administration: Jackie Albarran, Sonah Allie, Umar Al-Uqdah, Brian Anderson, Lauren Bern, Larisa Bravette, Anita Brennan, Willa Bugnon, Angela Calderon, William Christie, Tianya Coachman, Matthew Cohen, Genie Colbert, Angeliki Ebbesen, Leslie Edmond, Mimose Elie, Mercedes Falber, Sevi Glekas, Brian Gourley, Molly Greenwood, Anthony Guerrero, Sung Hwang, Tida Infahsaeng, Brian James, Rodrigo Jaramillo, Valerie Keane, Rene Leni, Shelly Lyser, Felicia Marcus, Leonard Patterson, Shravya Reddy, Ann Roach, Roseann Rock, Stephanie Sandor, Robyn Spencer, Milagro Suarez, Vivek Varughese, Catherine Vega, Bradley Wells

spring 2010

onearth 6 3

open space in touch with my INNER REPTILE

over a span of both months and miles. In captivity, alligators congregate Watering Hole lounge in Sebring, Florida, beside the cage of at an appointed hour for regular meals. Despite a natural wariness of a 14-foot alligator. Driving, I’d noticed a sign touting his size, humans, they become bold if habitually fed, shy if frequently hunted. pulled over, and entered a bar. The reptile did not flinch at my One Miami resident who kept an alligator named Gwendolyn in a arrival; with my face inches from his, not a spark ignited the backyard pool for years even swore his pet knew her name, came shiny black surface of his eyeballs. I resisted an urge to stick when called, and enjoyed the music of George Michael. my finger through the cage mesh—and began to wonder if I wasn’t Behavioral scientists agree that familiarity with another necessarunder the sway of forces more powerful than roadside advertising. Un- ily breeds interpretation, by both parties. Empathy is the basis of all reasonably, I wanted his recognition. communication, but practiced between Why do we yearn to connect with species it can also lead to disappointanimals? More immediately, why did ment. Once, when an alligator that I imagine that this cooped-up alligator had become a fixture in a neighborseemed glum, in the way other humans hood lake in Florida ate a little girl, a believe, say, that their Chihuahuas enresident told the local paper, “I never joy wearing tiny sneakers to the mall? thought these things would hurt you, Tragedies abound that testify to the but I don’t know what they’ve got in impossibility of fully taming and betheir minds now.” In his essay “What friending members of another species.

Is It Like to Be a Bat?” the philosopher Travis, the chimpanzee that tore off a Thomas Nagel explains the problem: Connecticut woman’s face last year, for our imagination, constructed with huinstance, could also adeptly sip from a man references, can’t approach the wineglass. Yet we persist in our efforts experience of another being. A person to understand and be understood outendeavoring to envision what it is like side our genus, Homo. Why? for an alligator to be an alligator is picIn 1977 the novelist John Berger turing instead what it would be like for wrote an essay called “Why Look at her to float in a lake with only her eyes Animals?” in which he suggested one above the surface, catch fish in her answer: despite our differences, finding mouth, and weigh 500 pounds. existential similarities to other animals I did that for a while at the Watermakes humankind feel less cosmically ing Hole. I imagined how hopeless alone. But pet ownership and animal and bored I would feel living alone in Though I knew his massive body attractions don’t offer a communion a cage barely longer than my body. I housed a brain less hefty than a poker with nature, he argued. Rather, they couldn’t help it: getting up to leave, chip, I couldn’t help but wonder what are evidence of society’s complete withI whispered, “Hey, I’m really sorry.” was going through his mind drawal from nature—relics of a bygone Somehow, it was easier to accept that era when humans defined themselves the alligator might feel bad than that in relationship to the other sentient beings with which they lived side he might have no—zero—feelings at all. Now I wonder if what I’d by side. We can’t truly “encounter” animals in captivity, Berger wrote, really wished him to have was an identity immune to my projections—if because they are merely reflections of ourselves. it was a desire to provoke his independence, not relate to him, that That may be. But it isn’t always so clear where our thinking ends and tugged my hand toward his head. The alligator’s ancestors had arisen an animal’s begins. Take my alligator. Though I knew his massive body in the Triassic; in him lived unfathomable stretches of time on earth. housed a brain less hefty than a poker chip, I couldn’t help but wonder That humans had utterly subdued him, that I could look at him and what was going through his mind. Most likely, absolutely nothing: see only myself, was, in a way, like the end of the world. alligator thoughts are probably “like a dial tone,” a zoologist once told the New Yorker. And yet, while unintelligent by our standards, crocodil- Kim Tingley, a freelance writer in New York, is at work on a book about ians possess homing instincts that can return them to a pond of origin Florida’s alligators. This is her first piece for OnEarth. t seemed simple, how I FOUND MYSELF at the

6 4 onearth s p r i n g 2 0 1 0

illustration by darren hopes

I

BY KIM TINGLEY

LET THIS BE YOUR LEGACY.

ANNOUNCING THE NRDC LEGACY LEADERS MILLION DOLLAR CHALLENGE When you include NRDC in your estate plans today and tell us about it, Earth Friends and a generous NRDC Trustee will match your future gift with an immediate contribution to NRDC’s Wildlands Campaign, up to $1 million. Your gift will help preserve our natural heritage now and protect the planet for generations to come.

If NRDC already has a place in your plans, please let us know right away so that we can take advantage of this unique funding opportunity.

For information on how to include NRDC in your estate planning, please contact: Michelle Quinones Senior Planned Giving Specialist at 212-727-4552 or legacygifts@nrdc.org