OnEarth Summer 2011

haiti plants the trees of Life why size matters in detroit the politics of corn Ethanol

A Survival Guide for the Pl anet

Published by the Natural Resources Defense Council

How to make things that won’t kill us

PURE CHEMISTRY summer 2011 w w w.one arth.org

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contents

Onearth magazine

volume 33 number 2 summer 2011

FE ATUR ES

d epartm ents

28 Planting the Trees of Life

by Jacques Leslie

cover story

37

Haiti seems cursed by history, staggering from one disaster to the next. But dedicated local activists refuse to give up the fight to reverse centuries of environmental degradation.

Down-on-their-luck automotive towns team up to roar back. Plus, a young Missouri woman inspires a new breed of urban farmer.

Q&A Those most afflicted by climate change are those who did the least to cause it. Former president of Ireland Mary Robinson says it’s time for some justice.

44 The Corn Mob

by Lindsey Konkel and Gary Hovland

24 the synthesist

Remember when corn ethanol was touted as the green fuel of the future? Now it’s a $6 billion a year boondoggle—whose days may finally be numbered.

by Alan Burdick Artificial illumination at night takes its toll on the natural world. We need to find a way to curb its effects.

26 living green

46 Motown Revival?

by Scott Dodd A new dad sets down roots—and connects to his past—with a backyard vegetable garden.

by Matthew Power

Detroit has become our most notorious story of urban collapse. But perhaps we should consider the city’s official motto: “it shall rise from the ashes.”

Chemists have always been told that their job was to create miracle molecules, not to worry about public health. At Berkeley’s Center for Green Chemistry, Marty Mulvihill plans to change that.

poe try

14 Torn

by Mary Oliver

57 Farewells

by Ben Howard

onearth online

toby burditt

visit onearth.org

Read the digital edition of the magazine on your computer, e-reader, or tablet device and access complete back issues at onearth.org/digital

8 From the Editor 14 Letters 17 FRONTLINES

Pure Chemistry

by Laura Wright Treadway

For more than half a century, we’ve been poisoned in the name of progress. But scientists, consumers, and even big corporations are starting to come to the same

54 reviews

Science fiction writers ask if climate change is transforming Earth into the ultimate alien planet.

64 open space

by Ginger Strand Should images of a ruined posthuman world be an invitation to despair, or a call to action?

i n s i d e nr dc

10 view from nrdc

conclusion—we should find ways of designing the

by Frances Beinecke

products we need without endangering our health in

12 eye on washington

the process. There’s a name for this: green chemistry.

by Edwin Chen

58 dispatches

Cover: Photograph for OnEarth by Tia Magallon.

A victory for environmental justice, honoring John Adams, and more.

s u mmer 2 0 1 1

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CO L UMN S

The Edge

top: Mario Vildosola; Burdick and Tingley: poon watchara-amphaiwan; wright treadway: anthony Clark; bottom: craig lee/corbis

George Black has covered conflict, culture, and climate change on five continents. Now OnEarth’s executive editor offers a seasoned perspective on the tough choices we all face regarding energy, natural resources, and protecting the few pristine parts of the planet we have left. onearth.org/theedge

Species Watch Can a jellyfish live forever?

Are crows evolving intelligence? Is setting dogwood trees on fire actually good for them?

Contributor Kim Tingley celebrates some of our planet’s most remarkable creatures—and creative efforts to preserve them. onearth.org/specieswatch

4W E B

E X C L U S IVE S

The Synthesist Can’t get enough of our green tech columnist [see p. 24]? Neither can we, which is why contributing editor Alan Burdick also writes online every month, exploring the intersection of innovation, culture, and the environment. onearth.org/synthesist

Observed In our newest online column, debuting this month, contributing editor

ENTER OUR photo contest Share your best nature photography with us. We’ll publish our favorite shot in the pages of the magazine [see this issue’s pick on p. 61].

Laura Wright treadway

LINK TO OUR Network

brings a scientist’s training, her distinct voice, and a good dose of common sense to the environmental challenges we encounter in everyday life. onearth.org/observed

Facebook.com/onearth.org Twitter.com/OnEarthMag OnEarth.Tumblr.com Flickr.com/OnEarthMag YouTube.com/ OnEarthMagazine

onearth.org/webexclusives

Strawberry Fields Forever

America’s Trash Trail

Mining Michigan Again

California’s first organic strawberry grower has shown it’s possible—and profitable—to raise beautiful berries without cancercausing chemicals. If only the rest of the industry would start to follow his lead.

New York City spends more than $1 million a day dumping its trash in nearby states. Other cities do the same, piling up costs and endangering citizens’ health.

But San Francisco and Austin have found a better way.

Once America’s leading copper producer, Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is dotted with abandoned mines and residual pollution. Now the mining companies are back, and some residents aren’t welcoming them home.

s u mm e r 2 0 1 1

onearth 5

contributors toby burditt (“Pure Chemistry,” p. 37) grew up everywhere from British Columbia to New York City and Atlanta. After 10 years in the advertising world in Atlanta and San Francisco, he left to concentrate on photography. He now lives in Oakland, California, with his wife and two sons.

Ginger strand (“After We’re Gone,” p. 64) is the author of a novel, Flight, and two books of nonfiction: Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies and the forthcoming Exit: Utopia—Serial Killers on America’s Open Road. She writes for a variety of magazines, including Harper’s, Wired, and Orion, where she is a contributing editor.

matthew power (“Motown Revival?” p. 46) is a contributing editor at Harper’s and writes frequently on environmental and social justice issues. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, Slate.com, and Wired. He was a 2010–2011 Knight-Wallace Journalism Fellow at the University of Michigan and lives in Brooklyn, New York. 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.

strand: Orianna Riley; power: amber hunt

Andrew Moore (“Motown Revival?” p. 46) is best known for his thoughtful and vibrant images of Cuba, Russia, Times Square, and, most recently, Detroit.

Moore’s work has appeared in National Geographic and has been exhibited at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. He is a professor at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Zen and the art of NO

PLASTIC

editor’s letter

I

building the future from scratch wouldn’t blame you if sometimes you feel disheartened these days, but

D ouglas S . b arasch

8 onearth

summer 2011

Poon Watchara-Amphaiwan

several stories in this issue point to new beginnings. And our cover story—by contributing editor LAURA WRIGHT TREADWAY—is about a revolution that is starting from scratch.

Maybe you know this already, but 82,000 chemicals are now loose in our environment—in toys and clothes, furniture and appliances—and only a tiny percentage has been tested for safety.

Only five have ever been pulled off the market. Each one of us has traces in our blood of several hundred synthetic chemicals, and mounting evidence suggests that many of them are dangerous to our health. You may have heard, for instance, about BPA, an endocrine-disrupting chemical, and about phthalates, which decrease the production of testosterone in boys in utero. We desperately need a stronger law than the one we have—the laughably weak Toxic Substances Control Act. But many chemists (and businesses) want nothing less than an entirely new way of creating chemicals that are designed from inception not to do us harm. Wright Treadway visited the University of California, Berkeley, the nation’s most prestigious training ground for chemists, where the newly opened Center for Green Chemistry is teaching the scientists building tomorrow’s new molecules a lesson no one previously bothered to offer them: how to make things that won’t kill us.

Detroit, having lost 60 percent of its population since 1950, is the incredible shrinking city. Entire neighborhoods have been abandoned; urban farms have sprouted in empty lots; soaring edifices of industry stand barren like Roman ruins, overgrown with grass and weeds. With fewer residents and a smaller tax base, the city struggles to provide basic services such as police, fire, and sanitation to sparsely populated areas. Now Detroit has initiated a bold, public conversation that will ultimately redefine its boundaries, its people, and its future. As writer MATTHEW POWER and photographer ANDREW MOORE discovered, therein lies great opportunity. What could rise from the apparent bleakness is a phoenix of urban vitality: denser, bustling neighborhoods, efficient transportation, gardens—all the components of what’s come to be called smart growth.

Could we even dare to imagine a new beginning for Haiti, the most impoverished nation in the Western Hemisphere? Author JACQUES LESLIE and photographer LYNN JOHNSON remind us that the origin of many of that country’s woes can be traced to deforestation. The loss of trees erodes the soil, which makes flooding worse yet leaves rivers dry and fields parched. The land yields less food, and mothers and children suffer malnourishment. Rural populations flow into urban ghettos. More trees are cut down for charcoal to provide fuel. Yet against this despairing backdrop, innovative projects to reforest Haiti offer the glimpse of a fresh start: planting millions of trees—trees of life—that bear fruit, renourish the land, offer a sustainable livelihood, and feed the people.

These stories suggest that out of chaos or decline solutions can arise: even from broken pavement and desiccated land, it’s possible for the green shoots of novel ideas and new promise to emerge.

On your first anniversary at New Belgium Brewing you get a shiny new cruiser and employee-ownership. It comes with a feeling of trust, empowerment, and the desire to do what’s right. Together, we have decided

that minimizing our environmental impact, contributing to our community, and encouraging the growth of each other is the right path for us. We call it Alternatively Empowered. And it pedals us all.

view from NRDC

O

nce again gas prices have spiked and politicians

are clamoring for solutions. We have been here before. Every president since Richard Nixon has urged us to end our costly and dangerous reliance on oil.

But despite all the talk, our national leaders have failed to secure the policies that would dramatically reduce America’s oil dependence. Nor have they pushed to free us from other dangerous energy sources, despite such recent tragedies as the accident at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station, the BP oil disaster, and the death of 29 coal miners in West Virginia last spring. But while Washington has dithered, the rest of the country has moved forward.

The market for fuel-efficient cars has exploded. Today, 31 hybrid and electric models are on the road; another100 are expected to follow within four years. With gasoline prices above $3.50 per gallon in March, hybrid sales shot up 46 percent compared with a year earlier. Across the Midwest, more than 20 factories have opened or expanded in the past two years to make advanced lithium car batteries and electric vehicle components.

We’ve seen a similar expansion in related areas of green technology. After sustained advocacy by NRDC and others, American Municipal Power of Ohio cancelled plans to build a $4 billion coal-fired power plant in Meigs County in favor of meeting rising energy needs through far cheaper efficiency measures, solar power, and other forms of cleaner energy. The wind industry now employs 75,000 Americans; there are more wind workers than coal miners in the United States. Many of these successes have been spurred on by smart state policies: California’s new law requiring 33 percent of electricity to come from renewables by 2020 is the most ambitious, but Arizona, Michigan, Missouri, and 28 other states have enacted their own versions.

The White House and Congress should follow their example. President Obama got off to a good start by requiring vehicles to reach an average of 35.5 miles per gallon by 2016. But much more can be done. NRDC is calling on the White House to raise fuel economy standards to 60 miles per gallon, pass a national renewable energy requirement, and create green building standards that will reduce home and office energy usage by 20 percent. Technologies exist to achieve these goals, but we have to build the political momentum. You can help. In September, the federal government will propose new fuel economy standards. Go to NRDC’s Web site and tell decision makers to increase fuel standards to 60 miles per gallon by 2025.

f r a n cE s b e i n e c k e , P r e s i d e n t

1 0 onearth

SUMMER 2011

nrdc in the news “‘One Rig Closed down the fishing industry, the oil industry, and the tourism industry,’ said Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council and a member of the spill commission. ‘That cannot happen again.’”—From “Vigils Mark Year After BP Spill,” USA Today, April 21, 2011

“‘The Near-death experience of the auto companies when they got hit with the last gas price spike finally convinced them to get off the gas-guzzling business model,’ said Roland Hwang, the transportation program director at the Natural Resources Defense Council.”—From “Conventional Gas-Powered Cars Starting to Match Hybrids in Fuel Efficiency,” Washington Post, March 9, 2011

“‘it’s closing the loop,’ said Allen Hershkowitz, a senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council.

‘It’s the beginning of the end for petroleum-based plastic bottles.’”

—From “PepsiCo Announces AllPlant-Based Plastic Bottle,” Chicago Tribune, March 15, 2011

“‘WE think that an honest review will show that the Keystone XL pipeline is not needed and too risky to permit,’ said Liz Barratt-Brown, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council.”—From “US Will Do New Studies on Keystone XL Tar Sands Pipeline,” Greenspace, a Los Angeles Times blog, March 15, 2011

Matt Greenslade/photo-nyc.com

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NRDC

eye on washington

by edwin chen

Anatomy of a flip-flop change their minds for good reasons. “There are cases Fred Upton called climate change where public officials evolve because they have thought “a serious problem’’ and said that more about a subject. Isn’t that what we should want?’’ “everything must be on the table Sabato says. “I worry about people who never change their as we seek to reduce carbon minds. We used to believe consistency was the hobgoblin of little minds, but now we insist on absolute faithfulness emissions.’’

By last January, under fire from to one’s old ideas.’’

So when politicians do flip-flop, it’s important for us to Fox News, the Michigan Republican had erased that position from understand their rationale and, if possible, their motivation. his official Web site. Next Upton They deserve an opportunity to explain themselves— led the charge to block the Environmental Protection fully and without obfuscation. If they don’t come clean, we Agency (EPA) from updating safeguards to protect us should demand that they do. So should the press.

Much of the news media seem to be falling down on the from carbon dioxide pollution, a major contributor to rising temperatures and extreme weather conditions. Then, job when it comes to the phalanx of leading Republicans in another about-face, this time pressured by Glenn who once were for curbing carbon dioxide pollution but Beck and Rush Limbaugh, the soon-to-be chairman of now are against doing so. Some of them now even question the House Energy and Commerce Committee turned whether climate change is real. Clearly, these flip-floppers are not following the scienagainst energy-efficient lighttific consensus. Nor are they bulbs. Four years earlier, UpTheir reversals look to be following public opinion, for ton had cosponsored a bill to nothing other than a stampede to if they were, they’d be clambegin eliminating inefficient endear themselves to hard-liners whose oring for action. (An ABC/ incandescent bulbs.

It’s usually not a pretty extremist agenda includes attempts in Washington Post poll last June found that 71 percent sight when politicians Congress to cripple the EPA of respondents believed the abruptly reverse course, for they expose themselves to one of the most withering federal government should curb carbon dioxide pollution monikers in politics: flip-flopper. And Upton is far from from cars and power plants.)

So their reversals look to be nothing other than a stamalone when it comes to flip-flopping on the issue of climate change. Another prominent Republican lawmaker to do pede to endear themselves to Tea Party hard-liners whose so is Scott Brown. As a state senator in Massachusetts, he extremist agenda included last spring’s attempts in Convoted for a regional compact to curb carbon emissions. In gress to cripple the EPA, an agency created four decades April, now a United States senator, Brown voted to block ago by overwhelming majorities in both houses of Conthe EPA from issuing Clean Air Act protections that would gress and signed into law by President Nixon.

Denying climate science has become, for some in the regulate CO2 emissions.

“When a politician flip-flops, he or she risks a ‘weather right wing, a quasi-religion. Shameless pandering is an vane’ ad accusing them of blowing in the wind,’’ says Larry inescapable fact of life in politics. But when elected officials Sabato, a professor of politics at the University of Virginia. flip-flop on an issue as critical to our well-being as climate To deflect such accusations successfully, a politician must change, they owe us nothing less than a full and honest persuade the public that his or her change of mind was explanation of why. Unless, that is, they don’t have one. driven by substance and principle, not politics. That can be a steep climb, in part because the news media usually treat Edwin Chen is NRDC’s federal communications director. A former a flip-flop as something of a “gotcha” story and ascribe the White House correspondent for the Los Angeles Times and later worst of motives. That knee-jerk reaction all but ignores the Bloomberg News, Chen was the first elected minority president of reality that politicians (like all human beings) sometimes the White House Correspondents’ Association.

1 2 onearth S u m m e r 2 0 1 1

illustration by bruce morser

In 2009, Representative

Announcing a New Awards Initiative to cultivate

The Healing Power of Nature The Open Spaces Sacred Places National Awards Initiative invites proposals from cross-disciplinary teams who seek to create a public urban green space and study its impact on visitors. We know intuitively and anecdotally that nature heals and uplifts the human spirit. And, we believe there is a growing need to complement these insights with empirical evidence in order to advance understanding.

The Initiative will fund the creation of significant new Open Spaces Sacred Places across the US from a funding pool of $5 million. Teams will work collaboratively to conceptualize, plan, design and implement the physical space, the research study and the dissemination of the findings.

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Photo Credit: Alex Newman

backtalk

It was refreshing to read “Free the Mississippi,” by David Gessner (Spring 2011), a great retort to the “we are not worthy” creed of environmental journalism that I have grown accustomed to reading. He who can align our instincts and hungers with a better outcome for the planet will effect change a hundredfold over he who seeks to change our human nature.

—PAUL HUGHES

Chelmsford, Massachusetts Gessner reports serious problems resulting from the Army Corps of Engineers’ straightening out the Mississippi River. Didn’t they also cause havoc damming rivers and reengineering the Everglades? This in addition to irrigating deserts in the west in such a way as to lower the water table? Perhaps it is the Army Corps of Engineers that should be straightened out or drained.

—RICHARD SCHULMAN

New York, New York

NUTRIA-PALOOZA I am distressed by “If Ya Can’t Beat ‘Em, Wear ‘Em,” by Barry Yeoman (Spring 2011), which advocates killing nutria for fur

1 4 onearth s u mmer 2 0 1 1

It is truly disheartening that an environmental magazine would applaud the idea of using one of our ecological mistakes as a sales gimmick for a moneymaking scheme to sell useless high-end fur coats, teddies, and iPad covers. How about “blackbird hats for clean energy” or “feral cat purses to save the rain forest” for next year’s runway?

There are loads of “environmental pests” on the hit lists of various segments of the population, whether agricultural or urban.

It’s likely no one would buy these especially ugly furs unless they came with the feel-good bonus of saving an estuary.

—LINDA KELSON

Encinitas, California

LOST IN THE WOOD I was delighted by the poems “Bringing in the May/Maybe

Not,” by William Greenway, and “After the Snows,” by Elton Glaser (Spring 2011) , but dismayed to find that neither Mr. Greenway nor the magazine’s editors had checked the Macbeth reference to determine that the

onearth@nrdc.org

moving wood in the play was “Birnam” and not “Burnham.”

Thanks, anyway, for a great issue and for the continuing fine work done by NRDC.

—AVERIL KADIS

Washington, D.C.

Torn I tore the web of a black and yellow spider in the brash of weeds and down she came on her surplus of legs each of which touched me and really the touch wasn’t much

but then the way

if a spider can she looked at me

clearly somewhere between

outraged and heartbroken made me say “I’m sorry

to have wrecked your home

your nest your larder” to which she said nothing

only for an instant

pouched on my wrist then swung herself off

on the thinnest of strings

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.

back into the world.

This pretty, this perilous world.

—B y M a r y O l i v er

illustration by blair thornley

STRAIGHTEN UP

to deal with damage they do to marshlands. Humans created a problem by introducing a nonnative species into Louisiana to make money from the fur trade.

The nutria may be doing harm to the marshes, but that pales in comparison to destruction by humans, such as filling in wetlands and building offshore rigs that explode in the Gulf. Can’t these defenders of marshlands come up with something more creative than killing animals?

—RICHARD W. WEISKOPF, M.D.

Syracuse, New York

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summer 2011

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

Nature’s Payback

DREAM FACTORY

Mayor Kris Ockomon sees a new future for Anderson, Indiana.

The value of a property

rust belt rising

Photograph FOR ONEARTH by saverio truglio

With the help of a group called the Mayors Automotive Coalition, down-at-the-heels towns are reinventing themselves­, in various shades of green

I

b y c hristopher weber

was a GM brat myself,” says Kris Ockomon, the imposing mayor of

Anderson, Indiana, in his spirited Hoosier twang. “Both my parents retired after 30 years of service. It’s been a way of life around here.”

Indeed, ever since 1906, when brothers Perry and Frank Remy developed an electric car starter in Anderson, the city has been synonymous with automaking. For nearly a century, freight trains set out from its downtown carrying alternators, wire harnesses, horns, and headlights to General Motors factories scattered across the country. No fewer than one out of every three Anderson residents worked in the city’s two dozen parts plants.

But that was then, of course. Like scores of other cities and towns spread out across the nation’s Rust Belt, Anderson watched as its automotive industry collapsed, a victim first of globalization and then of prolonged economic slump. In the past two years, though, Ockomon has steered this city of 57,000 toward a stunning reversal. In setting out to rehabilitate its industrial sites and retool its auto plants, he has attracted christopher weber was a 2009–2010 Middlebury Fellow in Environmental Journalism. He lives in Chicago.

owner’s healthy ecosystem—her pure water, clean air, active pollinators, and other “ecosystem services”— is hard to quantify. But a new report from the U.S. Forest Service suggests that to conserve our natural resources, we’ll need to figure out how to do that— and then develop a market that financially rewards people for protecting their land. “Ecosystem services are the benefits that nature provides, outside of things like timber and food, which already have a market value,” says Gina LaRocco, a conservation associate at Defenders of Wildlife and a coauthor of the report. To discourage deforestation, for example, the government of Costa Rica compensates property owners simply for refraining from planting crops or grazing animals on their land.

The 2008 Farm Bill established an Office of Environmental Markets, charged with creating an ecosystem market in this country. Robert Deal, LaRocco’s coauthor, looks forward to that becoming a reality. Financial pressure often pushes landowners toward development, he says, and “incentives can be the difference between keeping the land and selling it off.”—lauren f. friedman

SUMMER 2011

onearth 1 7

come Abound, a manufacturer of thin-film photovoltaic modules, into a plant built to make transmissions for Chrysler.

Kevin Hinkley is the mayor of Wixom, Michigan, which just green businesses and rebranded recruited a manufacturer of gearthe place along the way. boxes for windmills to its downAnd he’s not alone. Thanks in town. “When we attack Capitol large part to a group called the Hill on a fly-in,” he says, “you got Mayors Automotive Coalition, or 30-some mayors from around MAC, mayors across the nation’s the country. We’re Main Street. conservative-leaning heartland I don’t have the ability to run to are finding themselves the unLansing or Washington and hide likely stewards of bright-green from my constituents. I got to go towns. A six-foot-three former to church with these people. We police detective, Ockomon got hear the troubles they go through, together in 2008 with a handful and when we go to these congressof other mayors to found MAC, people, they see that struggle.” aimed at helping their comOf course, true recovery will munities deal with the litany of mean more than just winning a woes—unemployment, declinbunch of federal dollars and ating populations, the polluted and tracting green industry. “What’s abandoned industrial sites known required is as brownfields— identifying that had resulted streams of infrom the cri“When the dotted line is signed on come that can sis. The coalition this deal, we are going to be the poster get reinvested now serves more child for transforming a community in the economy than 50 commureliant on the auto industry” and in changnities, working ing infrastructo secure federal ture,” says funds by developing proposals and drafting bills tion of more far-reaching plans. Henry Henderson, director of the with the help of a Washington, Ockomon points to the Nestlé Midwest program for the Natural D.C., lobbying firm and then de- beverage factory that opened in Resources Defense Council.

“We can’t stop what we’ve scending on Capitol Hill to make Anderson in 2008, bringing jobs the case in person. “These guys for 600 with it, thanks in large part started in the last two years in know people,” says Anderson to water system improvements terms of moving from grease to deputy mayor Greg Graham of paid for by funds secured through green,” agrees Hinkley, who rethe lobbyists. “They can pick up MAC efforts. The town’s Flagship cently helped clean-tech outfits the phone and call them. And in Enterprise Center houses Bright Xtreme Power and Clairvoyant Washington, you have to have Automotive, the manufacturer of Energy negotiate a plan to set that or you’re going nowhere.” an electric delivery van, as well as up in a factory that once sent out That hasn’t been a problem for a lithium-battery company, both Thunderbirds and Lincoln Conthe mayors. Since 2008 MAC has of which received loans champi- tinentals. “When the dotted line advocated for more than $3 billion oned by MAC. Ockomon also is is signed on this deal,” he says, in funds for cleanup and rebuilding overseeing the redevelopment of “we are going to be the poster efforts in struggling automotive Anderson’s downtown, clustering child for transforming a small towns (including some whose new buildings along the rail lines community heavily reliant on the mayors aren’t official members). that once served the auto plants to automobile industry.”

Ockomon is similarly optimistic.

In early 2009, the group’s efforts cut carbon-spewing traffic. led to the creation of a $773 milIn Lansing, Michigan, Mayor “The [GM] retirees here are startlion trust fund to deal with environ- Virg Bernero, a co-founder of ing to diminish in numbers,” he mental contamination at former MAC, has repurposed blighted says, “and the young people realize GM facilities. “Communities like land to create a pedestrian-friendly that green energy and a healthy ours could never come up with “green zone” with industrial build- way of life—that’s the future.”

Make way for the Bright Autoenough money to clean up those ings converted to riverfront offices; environmental problems,” says and Tipton, Indiana, will soon wel- motive brats.

F R O N TLI N E S

1 8 onearth

summer 2 0 1 1

Graham, who himself oversaw a GM assembly line as a young man.

Another big success is MAC’s drafting of the Auto Brownfields Revitalization Act (ABRA), which will establish a $375 million fund at the Environmental Protection Agency to provide assessment and cleanup grants for the retooling of brownfields. ABRA also calls for a five-year plan to allocate $625 million for the redevelopment of brownfield sites and for job creation in hurting towns.

By reusing hundreds of acres of prime real estate, the mayors intend not only to rejuvenate downtown areas but also to preserve open space at their cities’ edges.

Such “smart-growth” strategies increasingly turn up on MAC members’ agendas, as their cleanup and recovery visions move in the direc-

Apocalyptic, But Fun In less than 40 years, the

effects of climate change will be clear: floodwater will rush through the London streets, snowdrifts will bury Moscow, and flames will tear through Sydney—or so says “Fay,” a time traveler from the year 2050, in a new video game from Daedalic Entertainment.

“We imagine a future where all of the worst-case scenarios have come true,” says Claas Paletta, a manager with the Hamburg-based company.

Set mostly in the present day, A New Beginning, which was released internationally earlier this year, turns beating climate change into a chooseyour-own adventure with a focus on two main characters: Fay, who is on a mission to reverse the mistakes of humankind that have made the planet uninhabitable, and Bent Svensson, an aging engineer mysteriously forced to give up on a potential solution having to do with engineered algae.

“The game isn’t telling players that they need to change their lightbulbs,” Paletta says. “Those things are important but not very entertaining.” Instead, he says, its aim is to get people thinking about the biggerpicture issues the characters are dealing with—things like “What’s my responsibility?” and “What’s too much responsibility for one person —l. f. alone?”

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See it in action!

Did the concept of climate justice grow logically out of a human rights framework? duty to protect

Mary Robinson looks out for the planet’s most vulnerable.

voice of the people We think of climate change as an environmental issue.

But if those most responsible differ from those most affected, isn’t it a human rights question as well?

Mary Robinson has made it

her life’s work to champion the underdog. Awarding her the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009, Barack Obama called her “an advocate for the hungry and the hunted, the forgotten and the ignored.” Robinson was the an interview with president of Ireland from 1990 to 1997 mary robinson and then served for five years as the

by Jocelyn C. Zuckerman U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights. In 2002 she founded Realizing Rights: The Ethical Globalization Initiative. Based at Columbia University in New York, the organization fostered equitable trade and decent work, promoted the right to health and humane migration policies, and encouraged women’s leadership and corporate responsibility. Robinson spoke with OnEarth articles editor Jocelyn C. Zuckerman about how her new Mary Robinson Foundation–Climate Justice, based at Trinity College Dublin, hopes to address the challenge of climate change, which she calls the “biggest human rights issue of the twenty-first century.”

What exactly is climate justice, and why did you establish this foundation?

I’d been working on the links between human rights and development, with a focus on Africa. We were particularly focusing on 2 0 onearth

summer 2 0 1 1

For me it did, both the climate dimension and advocacy around the idea of justice, because the richer parts of the world have all benefited from carbon-based growth, and we have been, if I may say so, very profligate in our use of carbon. Until recently, we didn’t understand that there was a limited carbon budget for the world. We have overused our potential allocation, while the poorest have not been using carbon to the same extent but now want to be able to develop. It’s in our interest that this should be a lowcarbon form of development. But they still have a right to development. So we need to ensure that, as we move to renewable energy, in order to mitigate the use of carbon, we provide access to low-carbon energy to the poorest. That will make people less dependent on development aid.

It’s a way of making them more productive, more able to raise themselves out of poverty.

What are the foundation’s main priorities?

The first is to promote the principles of climate justice. And those principles include a very strong gender dimension, because when you’re talking about poverty and making poor people

in vulnerable contexts—subsistence farmers, indigenous people—poorer, it’s the women who bear the burden. And in my experience it’s also the women who are the main agents of change.

You’re based at a prestigious university. Where does education fit into the equation?

It’s hugely important. We will be encouraging education at the primary level on the impacts of climate. In the more developed parts of the world that have benefited from carbon-based growth, we need to teach hab-

nrdc focus Jake schmidt

NRDC’s international climate policy director, based in Washington, D.C. Robinson talks about the role of the private sector in expanding access to green energy technology.

What’s your view of that?

The global deployment of clean energy technologies has skyrocketed in the past couple of years. Last year it reached $243 billion. If that were a national economy, it would be the 30th largest in the world.

The private sector sees huge benefits from investing in these technologies and is starting to convince governments and investors that renewables can compete with traditional fossil energy sources. The private sector has a vital role to play in spreading that message more widely.

For more of Schmidt’s thoughts on international climate policy, visit onearth.org/schmidtqa

left: European Union 2011 PE-EP/Pietro Naj-Oleari; right: illustration by Jonathan burton

the right to food and safe water, and I kept hearing, “Oh, but things have become so much worse” or “There are no seasons anymore” or “There’s flooding where we didn’t have flooding before.” I became aware that the impacts of climate were really being felt by subsistence farmers, by people in low-lying slum areas. By the poorest, in fact, who were not responsible for it. So the foundation is aimed at achieving justice for those who are the poorest and most vulnerable to climate change.

its of “reduce, reuse, recycle.”

When I was in Bangladesh recently, I was taken by seaplane down to the delta areas that are so badly affected by sea surge and the salination of water and soil. The first thing we did was go to a local school, where they put on a play about how to respond to a cyclone. They began with a taller boy pretending to be a tree, and then children came and cut him down and others warned that they shouldn’t do that [because trees are a buffer against storms and flooding]. I was very impressed. Schools everywhere should be doing things like that.

to do from Ireland, partly because I wanted to be back and partly because I feel that Ireland can be a valuable bridge to the poorest countries on climate justice.

We’ve come from poverty and famine ourselves, and we have a very good record on development aid. When I was president of Ireland, I can’t tell you the number of ambassadors, even from Muslim countries, who would make a point of telling me that they were educated in Irishrun schools—because those were the best.

You’ve talked about the importance of governments working together on these issues, but isn’t it in the nature of states to look out for their own interests?

Yes, I find that depressing, particularly at [the 2009 U.N. climate conference in] Copenhagen, which governments approached like a trade negotiation. But in an interesting way, technology is moving us beyond that, because there’s now a capacity to trace what countries are doing on carbon in a very visible way. Within a few years, for example, satel-

What role is the private sector going to play?

It’s the private sector that’s leading on energy efficiency, on new technologies. I’m interested in developing a network of those who recognize that we need to ensure equity in this renewable energy debate, so that the poorest people will have access to affordable and renewable energy.

The gadgets to do that exist.

Battery-powered solar lights are on sale in India, and they also recharge mobile phones. If we can get these out to millions of people, then presumably the price will come down. And if we can get light into people’s homes, that will change the lives of women. They will become more productive, and their children will be educated, and it will have a whole development benefit.

Do you think a foundation like yours can do things that states or U.N. bodies can’t?

After I finished my term as High Commissioner for Human Rights in 2002, I wanted to show in a practical way that it makes a difference when you take human rights seriously in a development context. The idea of the foundation is to have a permanent entity that will build up expertise over the years. It’s something I wanted

lite images will give us a much clearer picture of any country’s carbon footprint, and that will force governments into behaving with greater honesty and transparency.

So you see some fresh opportunities right now?

Yes. Psychologically things have changed. Going into Copenhagen, there was a lot of emphasis on the dire consequences if we didn’t get a fair, ambitious, binding agreement. It was kind of a doom-and-gloom argument, but since then I think the debate has shifted. I serve on the board of the European Climate Foundation, which is part of a broader organization called Climate Works.

There’s a Climate Works in California, with counterparts in China and India, and a Brazilian foundation that will also be part of this wider network. We’re very much focused on the opportunities for renewable energy and the creation of green jobs. We’re putting forward a much more optimistic scenario.

Now that you have grandchildren of your own, are you hopeful about the world they’ll grow up in?

starfish blueS

E

very day, a billion gallons of WASTEwater and storm

water flow from California into the ocean, bringing along heavy metals, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, and other contaminants. Researchers at the University of Hawaii recently found that populations of organisms like the bat star, which live virtually free of direct human impact, are in fact directly affected by the plume. In a paper published in March, Rob Toonen and Jonathan Puritz explained that the contaminated water acts as a barrier to the starfish larvae, effectively reducing gene flow between populations and threatening the species’ long-term survival. Out of sight, yes, but this study suggests we’d do better to keep our waste in mind. —rose eveleth

I think a lot about our grandchildren and the need to be more conscious that we are borrowing this earth from them. We all need to change our ways. I admit that I fly too much because I have to get to meetings, for example, but I’m trying to videoconference as much as possible. We’ve made our home more energy-efficient.

What makes me especially hopeful is that I think young people get these things. There’s a new generation growing up around the world. In China, in India, in Bangladesh, and in Europe, there’s a real sense that the world is changing very significantly and that somehow we have to address the opportunities and the challenges. And young people seem to get that in a way I find very encouraging.

summer 2 0 1 1

onearth 2 1

Emerald in Every Way

EARTH CHILD

The 29-year-old is training a new generation of farmers.

she’s all thAT Molly Rockamann set out to save a 14-acre plot in suburban Missouri. Now she oversees a farming program that could prove to be a model nationwide.

M

By emma marris

in urban and suburban outposts—she believes it’s farm in Ferguson, Missouri, going to take all kinds of people, and whatever kind isn’t particularly picturesque. of scrounged-up miscellanea they can enlist to help.

Rockamann doesn’t actually own this 14-acre plot, The rows of kale and broccoli are covered with polyes- but it’s taken the 29-year-old’s unique willpower to ter sheeting and lined with burlap sacks donated by a make it the community pillar it is today. She was local coffee roaster. Furniture in the open-air “living volunteering on the land when she learned that the room” runs to trash-picked chairs and a couple of last descendant of the family that had been farming homemade benches. Rusty tomato cages sit heaped here organically since 1883 was in her 80s. Rockamann didn’t want to see the farm in a corner. Nor do the people visit onearth.org go, and figured the best way to tending the crops fit the stereoto see Molly Rockamann and her farming apprenticeship program in action. save it would be to “create a comtype of the hay-chewing farmer. onearth.org/11sum/video munity of people attached to it.”

One is a retiree and another a high school student. There’s a nurse, a welder, and So when that last descendant was approaching 90, a professional barista, and they tend to shout at one Rockamann founded EarthDance, a program aimed another every time a plane flies low overhead from at bringing people of all ages and backgrounds together to learn and eat from this rich soil. She the nearby St. Louis Airport.

But for Rockamann all of these anomalies are part designed her initiative to be part-time, so that even of the point. If organic farming is to have a future those with families and jobs could participate, and in this country—especially if it is to gain traction she signed up everyone from home-schooling moms

2 2 onearth

O LLY R O C K A M ANN ’ S

summer 2 0 1 1

ments around the world have put in place programs aimed at growing their green-energy workforces.

But a new initiative in Ireland goes even further, offering sustainability-focused education and training across a broad spectrum of jobs and industries.

“People hear about the green economy but think, ‘Oh, I’m not a renewableenergy installer; it’s not for me,’ ” says Devyn OlsonSawyer, the director of studies at the Dublin-based program, called Green Works. “We’re trying to show that you can have a business in any sector and choose to run it sustainably.”

Anyone collecting unemployment in Ireland is eligible for free training at one of the five Green Works hubs throughout the country, and more than 1,500 people have signed up since the program began last November. Courses are offered in such disciplines as green interior design, marketing ecotourism, and artisanal food production, and students can bundle them together into a certificate or pop in for single three-hour workshops.

It’s not yet clear whether Green Works will expand beyond its current locations (the government will evaluate the program after this first year), but OlsonSawyer is optimistic that its holistic approach is here to stay. “Sustainability is important throughout all components of work and life,” she says, “and we hope to see Ireland come around to —l.f. this vision.”

photograph for onearth by Jennifer silverberg; opposite, top: illustration by Carl Wiens; bottom: Bernd Zöllner

In recent years, govern-

to middle-aged folks contemplating career changes for the initial nine-month program. Each of the 12 “apprentices” spent 10 hours a week engaging in every aspect of the operation—from planting and harvesting to learning about organic pest management and manning the booths at the two St. Louis farmer’s markets where EarthDance sells its produce.

Rockamann has highlighted hair and a nose stud; her looks don’t exactly scream “farmer.” But ever since she grew vegetables as a kid, she’s been preoccupied by the land. Stints in a farming program at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and with mushroom producers in Ghana and sugarcane growers in Fiji underscored her devotion to organics—and to mak-

ing them available to everyone.

The urban ag trend is terrific, Rockamann says, but she worries “that people may not take it seriously as a source” capable of feeding more than just the privileged few. Really scaling up production of organic food, she believes, will mean educating enough people to truly care about it.

To that end, Rockamann expanded her program and hired a farm manager to run the day-today growing operation while she concentrates on raising funds to buy the land. She instituted a community sponsored agriculture, or CSA, initiative to get more produce out to the neighbors. Today, EarthDance has 34 apprentices and fills 100 boxes a week with enough produce, Rockamann says, each

enough to feed a “vegetable-loving family of four.”

Aside from preventing this historic piece of land from being sold into residential parcels, Rockamann, who recently was honored with the Growing Green Young Food Leader Award by the Natural Resources Defense Council, says her priority is to ensure that successive classes of apprentices pass their knowledge on. She now offers farm tours to schools and recently instituted a film series in hope of expanding the EarthDance community. It’s no accident, after all, that at the bottom of the online roster of produce available, the energetic young Missourian has listed her most valuable crop of all: “New farmers!”

color them amused Go ahead, take one. Or wait. Maybe they belong to someone? And just what are a bunch of

$3-a-stem Gerbera daisies doing arranged in a glass case next to the public shower at Muscle Beach in Venice, California, anyway? Those are the kinds of thoughts Amely Spoetzl hopes will run through your mind when you encounter the help-yourself flower dispensers in her installation, “Just a Moment, Please.” The Germany-based artist launched the project in L.A. in 2009 and has reproduced it in Taipei and Berlin. “Thanks to the flowers,” says Spoetzl, who will take her blooms to Paris this June, “the identity of a location and its protagonists will be changed—maybe even, for an instant, invented anew.”

Growing a Better Bike Anyone who’s ever spent

time in rural Africa can tell you how intrinsic bicycles are to daily life there. In the absence of cars, they function as taxicabs, moving vans, even two-wheeled ambulances.

But such use can take its toll, and the bikes in Africa, most of which come from China, were designed for leisurely rides. “They need fixing all the time,” says John Mutter, a professor of earth and environmental sciences at Columbia University. Nor do they do anything to help the local economy. So a few years ago, Mutter co-founded the Bamboo Bike Project, with the aim of producing better bicycles at the same price, using local resources and labor. After considering several materials, Mutter’s team settled on bamboo, which is abundant, strong, and lightweight. “It grows very rapidly and is essentially renewable,” he says.

The project’s first factory, owned by a Ghanaian businessman, began production in January and should reach capacity this summer. The plan is to scale up to 20,000 bikes a year—enough to make a dent in the import market. “If you do it as a cottage industry,” Mutter says, it won’t have the necessary impact. “This is about economic empowerment. It’s not about another cute bike.” —l.f.

summer 2 0 1 1

onearth 2 3

the synthesist

by alan burdick

A study in Germany found that the lights around new gas stations attracted swarms of insects for the first two years, after which their numbers fell precipitously because all the bugs nearby, and any eggs they would have laid, had been effectively sucked out of existence.

“Lights have a remarkable vacuum effect,” says Christopher Kyba, a physicist at the Free University in Berlin. Insects are critical to ecosystems—tasty morsels in the food web and often, as with moths, key pollinators of plants—so ecologists are left to wonder about the long-term impact of the phenomenon on flora and fauna.

Kyba is an active participant in Verlust der Nacht (“loss of the night”), an ongoing endeavor by several institutes in Germany to explore the impacts of what’s becoming known as ecological light pollution. But as Kyba and his colleagues recently discovered, the underlying problem— the manifestation of the light itself—is more complex than anticipated.

For months, using devices called sky quality meters, they measured the brightness of the night sky over Berlin and nearby rural areas. The results were dramatic: in the city, clouds made the sky 10 times brighter than it would have been on a clear night, and five miles outside the city it was nearly three times brighter. “Some people might say, ‘Well, everyone knows it gets brighter under cloudy conditions,’ ” Kyba says.

“But now we know how much.” And the scale of the amplifier effect suggests that ecologists need to start taking it into account, given that many animals take their cues from moonlight or its absence. Until now, efforts to reduce light pollution have been led by astronomers, who have illustrated the problem with satellite photos of night-blazing cities. But satellite data may tell only part of the story. “For ecologists around the world, cloudy nights are more important than the clear ones,” he says. rom amoeba to human, NEARLY all living One can’t do much about clouds, of course, so solutions to light polluthings run on an internal clock, a circadian rhythm that regulates our respective business over a 24-hour tion typically aim at the lighting. “There’s a lot of room for improvement in the technology,” Kyba says. For instance, replacing high-pressure period. It’s nature’s way of optimizing the day: when best to spawn, lay, hatch, bloom, croak, sing like a mercury bulbs in rural road lights with high-pressure sodium bulbs can robin, or (if you’re a copepod) migrate up to feed reduce their appeal to moths by 50 percent to 75 percent. Low-pressure on algae in the watery light. The clock mandates sodium bulbs would draw even fewer insects, but they’re monochromatic, which could disorient salamanders that rely on color cues to find rest, too; there’s a time to close, to be silent, to sink their home ponds or frogs that consider coloration when selecting a into the murky depths and hide. Day, and night, are inscribed in us. mate. Newer LED streetlights can be dimmed to as But what if night stops coming, if daylight lasts visit onearth.org little as 20 percent of their maximum brightness. But all day? Stargazers already are seeing it. The illufor Web-only editions of Alan Burdick’s column, which appears monthly. the spectrum of LED lamps is different from that of mination from streetlights and other artificial night onearth.org/synthesist the lamps we’re using, Kyba says, “so it’s an open lighting is now so persistently bright that 10 percent of the world’s population, and 40 percent of Americans, no longer view question whether that’s better or worse for animals.”

But bulbs are the least of it. The place to start, Kyba says, is “to a night sky that the human eye perceives as fully dark. It’s a scientific encourage maximizing useful light and minimizing light that no one loss for astronomers and a psychic one for the rest of us.

More and more, ecologists are finding that this false light also takes uses.” Step one: make sure that most outdoor lights are shielded so they don’t radiate directly into the sky. “Globe lights, while admittedly a toll on the natural world. Every year, night-migrating birds collide pretty, are probably among the worst offenders,” he says. Architectural with bright buildings by the millions. Field studies have shown that and advertising lights could be flicked off after a certain hour. artificial light changes the spawning times of certain species of coral What’s called for is darkness: less of the light we disregard anyway, and fish whose reproductive cycle depends on a lunar clock. It washes out the mating signals flashed by fireflies. One scientist found that except, increasingly, to rue it. We’re bright people—too bright; surely we can figure this one out. a group of tree frogs halted their mating calls whenever the nearby football stadium held a night game and caused the sky to glow.

Insects are perhaps the hardest hit. The clouds of bugs that flock to Alan Burdick, a contributing editor and regular columnist for OnEarth, is the streetlights may be a boon to bats, but the effect is likely temporary. author of Out of Eden (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

end of the night

2 4 onearth

Summer 2011

illustration by jesse lefkowitz

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I

putting down roots by scott dodd

s there such a thing as

onion grass?” I asked my father over the phone. “Because if

there is, I think I’ve got an awful lot of it.” It was mid-March, and a deluge of cold rain had finally cleared my new backyard of the snow, ice, and slush that had covered it since before Christmas.

All through this especially harsh North Jersey 2 6 onearth

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winter—our first in the little gray house with the green shutters—I had been eyeing a particular spot near the back porch to plant a vegetable garden with my young son. It got plenty of sunlight, and the outdoor spigot was close enough that I wouldn’t have to drag a hose across the yard every day to keep it watered.

This weekend had provided my first chance to sink a shovel into the dark, moist dirt and begin tilling. But I’d quickly found myself at war with a foul-smelling plant with bright green stalks and bulbous roots that had laid claim to the same swath where I intended to sink tomato plants and carrot seeds. The gardening books that I’d curled up with on cold winter nights called this “getting to know your soil.”

I was encouraged by the fact that my chosen plot clearly supported life (the dozing earthworms I’d disturbed also seemed like a good sign), but I was starting to feel a little bad about evicting the current occupants, noxious-smelling as most of them were. After all, my wife and I had bought this house only the previous summer, and I knew that the prior owner had used this same spot to plant flowers and ornamental herbs. As I attacked the onion grass and encountered the thick roots of other plants waiting to spring from the earth, I felt a mild pang of regret. Who was I, the new guy, to say they had to go, when clearly they had such a hold on the place?

Still, I kept digging. I was determined to take up vegetable gardening, in part to establish what the more philosophical of my books called a “connection to the earth.” But I was also seeking a connection to my past and, I hoped, to my future as a husband, father, property owner, and all-around responsible adult. My growing sense of putting down roots—my feeling that this house represented not a temporary stopping point but a long-term relationship—was something novel for me. As a kid I’d moved with my family every few years, my father’s job taking us to places as varied as New Orleans, Tulsa, and Pittsburgh, where my parents finally settled. It wasn’t until college that I spent four straight years in the same school, and I can’t picture what any of my many bedrooms looked like in all those different houses.

But wherever we went, Dad would always pick out a spot in the backyard to plant his vegetables. It was one of the few constants and comforts in a childhood dogged by too many intimidating lunch tables in too many new school cafeterias. Now, with a house and family of my own, I wanted to build memories with my son, Henry—who turned 2 in early March—like the ones I have of helping out my dad. I wanted to trace furrows in the dirt together and drop in seeds; to keep out pernicious weeds and trespassing rabbits; to cheer when that first tiny green tomato appeared on the vine and wait impatiently for it to turn crimson and ready to pluck.

During our phone chat, my dad told me that his gardens had served as a source of relaxation over the years, a welcome break from the high stress of the office. But the joy of raising his own food had also given him a special tie to the earth, one that sitting at a desk all day never could. Now that I was the one with the job and the kid and the mortgage payments and the leaky basement, I was hoping for the same. And I was hoping my own son would get a sense of it, too.

Even if the joy-in-growing thing didn’t speak to him right away, I was pretty sure the food would. When I was a kid, it was all my

illustration by Dave cutler

living green

parents could do to get me to eat vegetables, but I was crazy over Unfortunately, the more I worked on my garden plans, the less the tomatoes that came right out of the garden. One of my favorite in control I felt. Despite my fond childhood memories, it had been late-summer dinners was—and still is—a BLT sandwich. Half the more than two decades since I’d lived in a house with a yard. How time we’d eat them without even bothering with the B or the L. As was I supposed to deal with all those acorns embedded in the grass? long as the tomatoes were sweet and juicy, and the toast sufficiently Or the weeds and ivy choking the flower beds? I went back to my dressed with mayo and salt, we were happy with them just like that. books, then ordered a few seed catalogs and debated whether to My dad’s fresh corn on the cob wasn’t half bad, either. buy that soil-testing kit I’d seen at Home Depot. My reading told me One of the books I’d read over that proper planning is essential to winter informed me that vegetable making sure that plants get enough gardens have declined in popuspace, nutrients, and sunlight to Spring showed little sign of arriving, larity over the past few decades, prosper. So one day, looking nothso I sketched out possible configurations passed over for ornamental lawns ing like a gardener, I trudged into for my rows, planting on paper what the and flower beds. Curious about the the backyard armed with graph shift, I called Bruce Butterfield, paper, a mechanical pencil, and a cold soil wasn’t yet ready to receive research director for the National tape measure. The plot was six feet Gardening Association, who has by ten, I dutifully recorded. There tracked interest in food gardening since 1978. While it’s true that were 108 inches from the knotted stump to the paving stone, and 16 vegetable gardening had been on the wane for a while, he said, that’s inches from the corner of the back porch to the rose bushes. As April beginning to change: 2009 showed one of the biggest upticks he’s crept closer and spring showed little sign of arriving, I sketched out seen in his career. The annual surveys commissioned by Butterfield dozens of possible configurations for my rows, planting on paper what indicated that 43 million U.S. households planned to grow some of the cold soil wasn’t yet ready to receive. their own food in 2009, up 19 percent from the previous year. The A week after the conversation with my dad, I could wait no longer. numbers stayed pretty much the same in 2010.

I grabbed my seed starter kit and interrupted Henry at his train You might recall that 2009 was the year Michelle Obama tilled the table. Did he want to come out on the porch and help me plant? I’d South Lawn to plant her own vegetable garden—the first at the White been telling him about my garden plans all winter, even describing House since Eleanor Roosevelt’s, during World War II—and I wondered those bacon- and lettuceless sandwiches to get him interested, but I if the growing cultural interest in healthy eating, fighting obesity, and don’t think he had any clue what I was talking about. How could he? eating local had anything to do with Butterfield’s rebounding numbers. This was my first chance to show him. Snug in our fleece hoodies, He said all of those factors probably helped, as did that perennial style we sat side by side with the kit before us on the patio table. “Look,” I shaper: the economy. When it’s good, people worry about how their grass told him, pulling a white speck from the seed packet, “this is a tomato looks. When it’s bad, they start thinking about how they can use their seed.” His brown eyes grew wide as I pushed it deep into the wet soil yards to help feed their kids. There’s also a psychological aspect. When and out of sight. “And these are peppers.” I showed him the slightly the rest of the world feels out of control, Butterfield said, “people at least larger, yellowish seeds. He tried to grab some and knocked them off want to feel that they can control what happens in their own backyard.” the table, so I put a few in my palm and let him pluck at them one by one. “Dirty,” he said, following my lead and pushing them into the soil.

“That’s right,” I replied. “We’re getting our hands dirty.”

S H ORT T A K E “How are you guys doing?” my wife asked as she came through the door to check on our progress.

“Tell Mommy what we’re planting,” I said.

Henry pointed to the big red tomato pictured on the packet and paige smith orloff wasn’t always a gardener. confidently proclaimed: “Apple.”

When she lived in Los Angeles, says the former HBO Okay, so maybe I hadn’t yet passed on any profound wisdom to my son. But as I’d learned from my father all those years ago, these executive, she regularly killed houseplants. Four years things take time. Right at that moment, poking seeds into the starter ago, Orloff moved to upstate New York, where she soil, I couldn’t have cared less if I ever got anything to sprout from now spends several hours a day planting, harvestmy meticulously measured plot. I knew I was planting more imporing, cooking, and canning her own food, much of it tant seeds out there on the back porch of our new home, and even if Henry couldn’t yet tell a Red Delicious from a Roma, I could already with the help of her two young children. Visit Orloff’s feel them taking root. new blog, “In the Weeds,” at onearth.org, for weekly

[

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Growing Together

updates on her adventures in living cleaner, greener, and closer to the ground.

Scott Dodd is the editor of OnEarth.org. He’ll share updates about his garden and photos of working with Henry at his blog: onearth.org/sdodd

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an honest day’s work The Fondation Seguin pays local Haitians to plant seedlings in the ChaÎne de la Selle mountain range, 30 miles south of Port-au-Prince.

after centuries of destruction, haitians try to recover their country’s lost forests

Planting The Trees of Life b y J a c q u e s L e sl i e photographs by lynn johnson

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Men dig in 100-degree heat at a sand mine on the outskirts of Port-au-Prince. Such activity contributes to erosion Gladys Norvelus has been working in the capital’s charcoal and the degradation of river systems, but it pays a decent wage. market since she was 16. Haiti’s charcoal industry, which also wreaks havoc on the environment, employs some 200,000 Haitians.

(Ninety percent of the population uses charcoal for cooking.) Now 67, Norvelus lost eight of her thirteen siblings in last year’s earthquake.

LIMITED OPTIONS

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G

onaïves, the third-largest city in Haiti,

lies on a floodplain beside the Caribbean Sea, and looks as if it could slide in. Twice in recent years, part of it has. In September 2004, Tropical Storm Jeanne deposited more than a foot of rain on northeastern Haiti, including the degraded mountains that form a horseshoe around the city. Forests are buffers against hurricanes, but the mountains around Gonaïves (pronounced Go-nye-eve) were stripped of their trees and topsoil long ago, and the ground became so hardened and compacted that it no longer absorbed water. Instead, Jeanne’s storm water hurtled downward to Gonaïves, collecting sediment, sewage, and human and animal carcasses as it swallowed the city in depths of up to 10 feet.

That was mere prelude. In one astonishing month four years later, a hurricane and three tropical storms visited Gonaïves. This time water rose as high as 25 feet, inundating two-story houses and forcing residents to live on their roofs for weeks.

The photographer Lynn Johnson and I went to the Jean Paul neighborhood, which was particularly hard-hit by the 2008 storms. It still hasn’t recovered. The first person we talked to there was Walter Prenevil, 42, an unemployed customs agent with a missing front tooth, who emerged from his front gate to check us out. He took us for a stroll through his haunted neighborhood. In this house, he said, pointing to a shell, seven people died. In that one—he pointed again—eleven did.

The second house was missing half its front gate, and the front door was covered with math equations written in chalk; a schoolchild had used it as a blackboard. Dried mud covered the front room’s floor in curled, gray triangles, and in the hallway it rose to three feet high, like a table someone forgot to move. All but one of the single-story house’s occupants drowned in Hurricane Hanna’s floodwaters. The survivor, the household’s father, escaped to a two-story rooftop next door, and hung on for three more days. Then Hurricane Ike hit, raising the water level to 25 feet, sweeping the man off the roof and into the maelstrom.

illustration by bruce morser

The plight of Gonaïves is Haiti’s in intensified form,

for deforestation is at the core of the country’s environmental debacle.

Deforestation is nothing new in Haiti: you can read the nation’s history by tracing the fate of its trees. Indeed, one of Haiti’s most celebrated novels, Jacques Roumain’s 1944 chef d’oeuvre, Masters of the Dew, depicts a valiant villager appalled by rampant deforestation and resulting drought and starvation.

Christopher Columbus noted in 1492 that Haiti was “covered with tall trees of different kinds which seem to reach the sky.” By the late 1600s, Haiti’s French colonial rulers had cleared jungles and savanna lowlands to make room for sugarcane fields; at higher elevations, they replaced trees with coffee plantations. All over Haiti, they cut down hardwoods such as mahogany and transported the timber to Europe in the same ships that brought slaves from Africa to work the fields. But it was Haitians themselves who perpetrated even more destruction: after the bloody revolution that brought independence to the country in 1804, its leaders increased hardwood exports to pay off onerous foreign debts. By the 1940s, all but a few timber stands were gone.

Eighty percent of Haitian terrain is mountainous, and those mountains have lost 98 percent of their original forests. Without tree roots to anchor it, Haiti’s topsoil flows down rivers, moves down mountains in landslides, or blows away as dust at an annual rate of 37 million metric

nrdc

WHY FORESTS MATTER

debbie hammel Senior resource specialist with NRDC’s forests project and an internationally recognized expert on forest management Why should we be so concerned about protecting the world’s remaining forests?

Forests have a vital role to play in the fight against climate change. They are the largest terrestrial store of carbon, and they provide ecosystem services such as protecting water quality and preventing soil erosion. They are also home to much of the world’s biodiversity. Logging and conversion to agriculture destroy natural habitat for wildlife and release large quantities of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Unfortunately, deforestation and degradation are continuing at an alarming rate. We lose more than 32 million acres of tropical forest each year—the equivalent of 36 football fields a minute.

What are the main problem areas in the United States?

I’d single out our southern forests. These are some of the most biologically diverse temperate forests in the world, but the timber industry has been rapidly replacing them with pine plantations. If current trends continue, the acreage of those plantations could increase by 60 percent by 2040, when they would cover an area the size of North Carolina and South Carolina combined. Pine plantations are not actually forests at all. These trees are industrial row crops managed for the purpose of fiber production. They support 90 percent to 95 percent fewer species than natural forests, and they wreak havoc on surrounding ecosystems.

Given that deforestation is driven by a global appetite for forest products, can we use the marketplace creatively to protect the most vulnerable areas?

Absolutely. For example, NRDC and its local partners worked with Georgia Pacific—one of the world’s leading manufacturers of tissue, packaging, paper, pulp, and building products—to develop a policy that commits the company not to purchase trees from new pine plantations established at the expense of natural hardwood forests or from those that contain threatened, endangered, or vulnerable tree species, atrisk wildlife, or rare forest types. As a first step, GP worked with us to identify 11 such areas, totaling 600,000 acres, in the mid-Atlantic coastal region, as well as 90 million acres of natural hardwood forests in the South. Effecting change in the marketplace is not a panacea—we still need strong regulations and effective government policies to protect the world’s forests—but it is an important part of our toolkit.

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tons—the equivalent in weight of 112 Empire State Buildings. As the topsoil is carried downstream, it clogs rivers; when it reaches the ocean, it smothers beaches and buries coral reefs. The loss of shade and moisture leaves the land parched, and Haiti’s rivers are going dry—28 of the nation’s 30 main watersheds are “completely depleted,” according to Arnaud Dupuy, head of the United Nations Development Program’s Haiti environment and energy unit. Water tables have dropped dramatically.

Topsoil loss is permanent, and without it, farmers’ yields have plummeted, consigning them to work plots so degraded that in less poverty-stricken countries they would be left fallow. The decline in crop yields has increased malnutrition and forced an exodus of rural Haitians to the crowded slums of the capital, Port-au-Prince, 100 miles to the south of Gonaïves.

The meagerness of Haitian diets has lowered resistance to disease, deepening the cholera epidemic that has killed nearly 5,000 people

since it began in October 2010.

It’s all part of a vicious circle: deforestation intensifies Haiti’s debilitating political instability; the instability deepens poverty; and poverty leads to more deforestation, as peasants cut trees for small amounts of cash.

Deforestation may even have played a part in triggering the cataclysmic earthquake that killed 300,000 Haitians on January 12, 2010. Four scientists led by University of Miami geophysicist Shimon Wdowinski suggest that over the centuries so much sediment has left the mountains above the tremor’s epicenter—at an average rate of a quarter-inch of soil per year— that the reduced pressure on the fault may have freed it to rupture. The earthquake, in turn, has caused further deforestation, by driving 600,000 residents out of Port-au-Prince and back into the depleted mountains and creating a surge in demand for wood sticks and planks to construct shelters for the many displaced Haitians.

RIPPLE EFFECT A newborn at the Hôpital Albert Schweitzer, in Deschapelle, shows the signs of malnutrition so common among infants Washing vegetables in this creek, south of Port-au-Prince, was a lot easier when and children in the food-insecure Caribbean nation. the water flowed. Thanks to the loss of trees and topsoil, 28 of Haiti’s 30 watersheds are completely depleted, and the rivers are going dry.

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nongovernmental organizations now working in Haiti.

Georges’s earnestness is disguised behind an unassuming appearance. On the day I met him, he wore jeans and a black baseball cap that said GROOM above the brim. I joked with him that he was obviously married to his work. Ethan Budiansky, head of international programs for Trees for the Future, calls Georges “definitely one of the best” of the 40 or so staffers who work for the organization in 25 countries around the world. His interest in forests was whetted as a child, when he heard his father, a farmer, blame deforestation for the increasing water scarcity he had to contend with. As a student at Queensland University, a private Christian institution in Port-au-Prince, Georges found that his professors concurred. Later he won a prized scholarship to study at the U.N.–mandated University for Peace in Costa Rica and emerged in 2008 with a master’s degree in natural resources. Then he joined Trees for the Future.

Though Georges began work in Gonaïves only a year ago, soon after the earthquake, he has already established six communityrun nurseries. The heart of his operations is the central nursery, where he teaches farmers how to compost soil, turn seedlings into mature trees, harvest limbs without killing whole trees, and replant when trees are cut down.

We reached the central nursery in Georges’s four-wheel-drive truck—a necessity given Haiti’s many unpaved, rocky, and craterous roads. A kombit, or community work party, was in progress, run by farmers’ wives. They squatted in a circle surrounding a mound of composting soil, which they were packing into black plastic bags together with seedlings—they were propagating Gonaïves’s future trees. Trees for the Future provides the seeds and bags; the farm families provide the labor. As they worked, the women sang, making up lyrics as they went along; one song celebrated their joining together to create the nursery. Other women cooked a communal lunch of rice and vegetables and laid out heaping plates for the entire group.

That afternoon, Georges spoke to about 60 children gathered at All this might render Timoté Georges’s ambition the nursery after school, introducing them to the importance of trees. quixotic, were it not so vital. As the Haiti project coordinator of a U.S.–based nonprofit called Trees for the Future, Georges, a gentle, Many children brought small used plastic water bags, which they gangly 30-year-old with a thoughtful mien, intends to set in motion filled with composting soil and seedlings. Georges said this was an so many community reforestation projects that the whole country experiment: if the used bags worked as well as the purchased black ones, he could save money while helping to rid the eventually will catch on. “Reforestation is a very visit onearth.org city of plastic refuse. The plan might not work, he slow process,” he said, in deliberate, precise Engfor a revealing slide show of Haiti images narrated by photographer Lynn cautioned, as the roots might need all the space lish that he learned in school. “The problem is Johnson. onearth.org/11sum/haiti the larger bags provide. The species were selected huge, and we are not able to solve all of it.” He thought for a moment, as if unwilling to sound downbeat, and added, for their hardiness, and their extensive root systems are part of what “But if we have enough resources, we can do it.” Since late 2008, makes them hardy.

The guiding assumption, based on hard-won lessons from hundreds Trees for the Future has planted 2.5 million trees in Haiti, including 750,000 around Gonaïves. These are modest numbers—and at least of failed projects over the last half-century in Haiti, is that reforestaa quarter of the trees will not survive—but they probably make the tion works only if farmers attain a better standard of living from the small nonprofit the leader in tree-planting among the thousands of trees and thus feel a personal stake in protecting them. Trees for the Today, tree-felling consists mainly of cutting down

Map by baker vail

unhealthy, immature, or unguarded trees for charcoal and burning ground cover to clear agricultural plots. Under the pressures of overpopulation and extreme poverty, those practices have accelerated in the past couple of decades.

Ninety percent of Haitians use charcoal as their cooking fuel; Port-au-Prince alone uses 80 percent of the country’s production. To feed the demand, the charcoal industry—if that word can be applied to an enterprise so low-tech and low-paying—engages at least 200,000 people, one in every 50 Haitians. In the mountains, men cut trees and limbs, sort the sticks into stacks, and cook them in pits to make charcoal; in acts of stunning, unsung athleticism, women march up and down the mountains balancing huge bundles on their heads, bringing the charcoal to city markets. Most of the laborers barely make a subsistence wage.

According to the United Nations Development Program, the industry generates $50 million a year. That means that a charcoal worker’s average income is less than a dollar a day.

In Port-au-Prince, we wandered through the narrow passageways of the Marché Salomon, one of the capital’s largest outdoor markets, until we found its Dickensian heart: a charcoal section that looked like a coal mine. The pathways were black, the shops stacked 10 feet high with charcoal bags were black, and black-clothed, blackskinned vendors sat on stools amid piles of charcoal: black on black on black. One of them, Gladys Norvelus, 67, struck me as the Queen of Charcoal, oozing dignity despite her charcoal-blackened hands and clothes and her shack of rusting corrugated tin. It was a bad location, she said, too deep inside the market, yet she’d worked in it for 50 years.

She answered our questions without emotion: her husband was blind, she’d lost eight of her thirteen siblings in the earthquake, she’d never heard that charcoal was bad for the environment.

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Haitian employees of the Fondation Seguin prepare land for tree planting in La Visite National Park.

Serge Cantave Jr., the executive director of the organization, surveys the damage from a fire set by local subsistence farmers clearing land to plant their crops.

Water pipes like the one in the village of Rofilie— installed, ironically, during the Duvalier dictatorship— make cooking and cleaning easier. The kids enjoy them, too.

TEACH THE CHILDREN At the Seguin Community School, Raymond Julcere incorporates lessons on conservation into the regular curriculum.

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Future chooses the communities it helps according to the degree of enthusiasm they show for a project; then local farmers run the nurseries. Here in the Gonaïves flatlands, farmers plant trees to form “living fences” around their fields and augment their income by selling tree limbs and, perhaps eventually, fruit from them.

This emphasis on individual farmers arose partly out of the work of University of Florida anthropologist Gerald Murray, who designed one of the few successful, long-running tree-planting programs in Haiti’s history. Murray deduced that the only way to get farmers involved in tree-planting was to give them ownership of the trees. A communal approach wouldn’t work; after all, according to a Haitian proverb, “a horse owned by everyone is a dead horse.”

Funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, the Agroforestry Outreach Project, which Murray planned and initially led, ran from 1981 to 2000. Its intention was not just ecological but also microeconomic: it taught farmers how to use trees planted on plot boundaries and marginal land as sustainable cash crops to supplement their meager incomes. According to Murray, the project reached an astounding 300,000 peasant households—more than a third of Haiti’s rural population in that era.

was a farmer who intended to clear ground cover for a small vegetable plot; he would use the ash as fertilizer until the plot ceased to be productive after two or three years. At least 2,000 farmers live illegally inside the park, and farmer-ignited fires are common. Alas, this one burned out of control and blackened nearly one-tenth of the park’s 5,000 acres—probably the biggest conflagration in its 27-year history. When we arrived, the ground was still smoldering; each step set off a small cloud of white smoke. Few mature pine trees were killed, but the fire destroyed the saplings that would have constituted the forest’s next generation.

It’s hard to blame the farmer, whose survival depends on the few dollars he’ll make from a crop in a matter of months; to think five or ten years out, long enough to grow a mature tree, is beyond his economic capacity. Still, Haiti’s future depends on stopping the watershed’s destruction, by either relocating the farmers or persuading them that reforestation is beneficial to them. Among the many ideas the Fondation Seguin is testing is paying them more money to protect the forest than they would make farming it. In one recent experiment, it paid farmers $50 a year; about 70 percent of them stuck to the agreement.

In the end, restoring watersheds will require a massive public works T h e ONLY DRA W B AC K O F project that only governments or the program was that it didn’t perhaps major NGOs can take restore watersheds, a task so on. Reforestation is not currently daunting and monumental that in vogue with the larger NGOs, most NGOs won’t consider taking which want the kind of immediate, it on. One exception is the Fondavisible success stories that come tion Seguin, which was started in WITH THESE HANDS Trees for the Future teaches kids from combating disease or build2004 by 16 members of the largely to plant trees, and to be committed stewards of the land. ing infrastructure. But the efforts foreign-educated, French-speaking Haitian elite in Port-au-Prince. We drove up into the Chaîne de la of groups like Trees for the Future and the Fondation Seguin Selle mountain range on an unpaved highway of rocks to reach suggest that it is still possible to imagine the outline of a soluthe organization’s base camp at a 6,000-foot elevation near the tion, in which an ample fraction of the more than $10 billion village of Seguin, 30 miles south of the capital. The roads are so pledged by foreign donors for earthquake relief is devoted to bad that the all-terrain vehicles the organization relies on must reforestation programs administered by international agencies be replaced every three years. High in the mountains, we had to and NGOs, one to a watershed. Such programs would not just remind ourselves we were in Haiti. For one thing, we were cold plant trees but would also install check dams, gully plugs, and most of the time, a rarity in this tropical country, and for another, alternating rows of bench terraces and vegetation to impede landthe Fondation Seguin’s tiny lodge is surrounded by tall, luxuriant, slides, slow floodwaters, and prevent erosion. They would teach tree-growing to farmers and ecology to schoolchildren. And they non-native eucalyptus and gravilea trees.

The organization’s mission, carried out on a budget of $10,000 a would reduce demand for charcoal by subsidizing the cost of promonth, is to protect La Visite National Park, which the headquarters pane stoves, as is done in the neighboring Dominican Republic, abut. La Visite, one of only three national parks in the country, crowns where reforestation has been successful.

I asked Winthrop Attie, 56, the philosophically minded cofounder Haiti’s biggest watershed, the Galet Sec, which provides water for three million or four million people, including some in Port-au-Prince. of the Fondation Seguin, who presides over the lodge, whether he Until four years ago, the Rivière Blanche, which descends from the still had hope for the watershed. “Not much,” he said. “But the love park to Haiti’s southern coast, flowed continuously; now it’s dry for of the earth keeps us fighting. We are the stewards of this little piece of the planet. If we set an example, maybe others will follow.” In Haiti, three months of the year.

The park encompasses a forest of Hispaniolan pines, which aren’t that’s considered optimism. used for charcoal. Instead, the organization must contend with another of the consequences of Haiti’s poverty. Two days before our Jacques Leslie’s book on dams, Deep Water (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), won visit, somebody set the park on fire. The arsonist almost certainly the J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award for its “elegant, beautiful prose.”

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c o v e r

s t o r y

toxic chemicals plague our lives. now the nation’s leading school of chemistry is teaching

a new generation of students the

tia magallon

mantra of the future: “benign by design.”

by laura wright treadway

•

portraits by toby burditt summer 2011

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cover story

O

n a drizzly

afternoon in early March, Adam Andrewjeski, an 18-year-old college freshman from Las Vegas, walks out of his dormitory room and, in his slippers, pads down a flight of stairs to a common laundry room on the University of California, Berkeley campus. But he’s not looking to do his laundry. He just wants to score some lint.

Andrewjeski leans into a dryer and pulls out a dark clump of fuzz. Thinking he may need a little more, he opens the next dryer and sweeps its lint catcher clean too. As he balls the two together in his pocket, he explains that he’s hunting for traces of PBDEs, chemical flame retardants. PBDEs were designed to be persistent; even after many washes, fabrics treated with the chemicals may still be shedding them. With that, he turns and heads up the stairs. He’ll collect the rest of his samples—dust, bits of foam from dorm room furniture—another day.

Andrewjeski is one of a growing number of students learning to think differently about the safety and sustainability of the molecules that make up our lives. Over the past decade, colleges and universities across the country have begun to offer courses in green chemistry, some even awarding Ph.D.’s in the field. But whereas other schools focus on teaching the principles of green chemistry exclusively to chemists, Berkeley intends to do something more. The idea here is that the best way to make chemistry sustainable is to bring together the chemists who will invent new molecules with the biologists who will unravel their toxicological effects, the future business leaders who will sell the products made from those molecules, and the policy makers who will regulate them. And because all this is happening in what is generally regarded as the nation’s most prestigious school of chemistry, where more than a thousand Ph.D. and undergraduate students grind away in classrooms and laboratories every day, there’s reason to be cautiously optimistic that green chemistry is on track to become the field of chemistry itself.

Chemistry is you and everything around you. Trillions of chemical reactions take place in your body at any given moment, allowing you to read the words on this page, to know you’re thirsty and get up for a glass of water, to sense that the room is a bit stuffy and open a window. And

sound advice: A dynamic presence in the classroom, Meg Schwarzman also advises pregnant women on how they can avoid exposure to harmful chemicals.

of all the goods bought and sold in the United States, some 97 percent incorporate manufactured chemicals of one kind or another. Many of them make life better: they are used to purify water, fight cancerous tumors, and keep the lights on. The problem is that of the 82,000 synthetic chemicals that have come into production to date, nobody is quite sure which ones simply make life better and which ones are harmful.

That is because for the past 200 years, since the advent of modern chemistry, nobody ever asked chemists to consider that question.

This article was made possible by the Jonathan and Maxine Marshall Fund for Environmental Journalism 3 8 onearth

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Illustration by bruce morser

J

ohn Warner is an industrial chemist-turnedentrepreneur who now runs a research and development center called the Warner Babcock Institute for Green Chemistry in Wilmington, Massachusetts. Over the course of his career, Warner has filed more than 200 molecular patents and founded the first Ph.D. program in green chemistry, at the University of Massachusetts at Boston, in 2001. His childhood friend Paul Anastas, who grew up with him in blue-collar Quincy, south of Boston, is now head of the office of research and development at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), where he oversees the latest science on chemicals assessment, including which methods toxicologists use to determine whether a substance is toxic. Together, Warner and Anastas pioneered the field of green chemistry in the 1990s, writing the first book for chemists seeking to design compounds sustainably, Green Chemistry: Theory and Practice.

At last year’s Bioneers conference, an annual gathering of thousands of business leaders, environmental advocates, and academics with a common interest in sustainability, Warner told the story of his father, an electrician, who “couldn’t come into your house and change a lightbulb without a document that said he could do it safely.” Teachers, architects, doctors—all need to prove that they have met a set of requirements for practicing their profession responsibly. But chemists, he lamented—the people who design products we eat, breathe, and absorb through our skin—have no such responsibility. “Imagine you want to be a chemist,” he said. “Think of any university you can imagine. Go online and find the courses you have to take to get a job as an industrial chemist. You will find that not one university will have you take a course in toxicology.”

Figuring out the effects on human health and the environment of the reagents, solvents, and final products used and produced by chemists simply hasn’t been the chemist’s job. In the lab, goggles, gloves, and gale-force fume hoods protected chemists from whatever dangers lurked, so it didn’t much matter what they mixed up as long as the end result was something new and wonderful that worked as it was meant to. But over the years we began to learn that molecules that were supposed to be locked away forever inside our TV sets and plastic toys found ways of escaping. By the close of the twentieth century, scientists were discovering that some of these molecules were making their way not only into the air, soil, and water, but also into fish and mammals—including us. Today the Centers for Disease Control routinely tests Americans’ blood for the presence of 219 classes of chemicals as part of its annual National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey. Other studies have detected as many as 493 in our blood. The effect of that chemical cocktail on the human body remains largely unknown, though a growing body of research is revealing that many of its components can wreak havoc on the delicate balance of hormones, proteins, and other molecules that make us tick.

Public health experts agree that the law that was meant to protect us from potentially dangerous chemicals—the Toxic Substances Control Act (TSCA)—is broken. The burden of proving that a substance is toxic falls to the government; industry has no obligation to prove that a chemical it has synthesized is safe. The law, passed in 1976, stipulates that when a company invents a new compound, it is required to give the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) just 90 days’

nrdc fixing a broken law

Daniel Rosenberg Senior attorney in NRDC’s public health program in Washington, D.C., and director of its toxic chemicals reform project

The conventional wisdom seems to be that reform of the Toxic Substances Control Act is dead in Congress.

I don’t agree with that view and I don’t really trust it. All our major environmental laws took years to get through Congress. In the past two years, we’ve seen significant reform bills introduced in both the House and Senate. This year we plan to build on that progress, and things are off to a reasonably fast start. NRDC president Frances Beinecke testified about TSCA reform before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in February, and Senator Frank Lautenberg has introduced a revised and improved version of last year’s bill. So there’s no reason this can’t be a live issue.

The opponents of reform, who include many in the chemical industry, like to say “it can’t be done” in the hopes of stifling momentum. It’s important not to fall for that kind of spin.

Why do you think this issue is being revisited now after being dormant for so long?

I think two of the main drivers are the adoption of broad chemical reform policies in Europe and around the world and the dramatic rise in reform efforts at the state level— most of which have had overwhelming bipartisan support.

Maybe even more important is the growing body of scientific evidence of all the ways in which chemicals may harm our health, their potential effects at very low doses, the combined effects of exposure to multiple chemicals, and the confirmation that we carry hundreds of chemicals in our bodies, even at birth.

Do you see reform of TSCA as inevitable in the long run?

Yes. It reminds me a bit of the Middle East, where you have all these corrupt, repressive regimes that have been around for 30 or 35 years, about as long as TSCA. Things that seem as if they will be around forever can change very quickly. Doctors and scientists are so concerned about the lack of action by policy makers that they are becoming more outspoken; there’s a marketplace revolt by consumers who don’t want to buy unsafe products; and large retailers like Walmart don’t want to go on carrying them. I don’t know if TSCA reform will ever have its Tahrir Square moment exactly, but if people occupied the National Mall for nine days demanding TSCA reform we would get something passed and sent to the president’s desk pretty quickly!

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cover story notice before the product is introduced into the marketplace. If the agency doesn’t raise any safety concerns within this period, no further barriers stand in the way of full-scale manufacturing. Although the law says that a company should submit any available safety data, it’s also okay not to if no data exist. To date, about 85 percent of all new chemical notices have been submitted without any safety data at all.

When the law went into effect, some 60,000 chemicals were already in production, and they got a free pass—no safety data required.

Among these were some nasty chemicals that in a few cases are now being voluntarily phased out or restricted. These include some members of the PBDE family of flame retardants as well as BPA, which was removed from some baby products and other plastics (though only in some states) after concerns about its role as an endocrine disruptor emerged in the 1990s.

But the vast majority of chemicals have been subject to no restriction. The law places an enormous burden on the government to prove not only that a chemical is causing irrefutable harm but that any regulations imposed will lead to no increase in costs over doing business as usual. Translated, that means that only five chemicals have ever been regulated under TSCA: PCBs, CFCs, dioxins, hexavalent chromium, and asbestos.

Two years ago, the Obama administration pledged to change that. EPA administrator Lisa Jackson testified before Congress that TSCA should be strengthened, arguing that “in the rare cases where EPA has adequate data on a chemical and wants to protect the public against well-known, unreasonable risks to human health and the environment, there are too many legal hurdles to take quick and effective regulatory action.” Last year, Senator Frank Lautenberg of New Jersey introduced legislation that would enable such action, but it failed to come to a vote.

Lautenberg’s bill was reintroduced in April of this year, but it’s not yet clear how far it will advance.

Either way, the Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry aims to help fill the gap. The center’s mission is threefold: to educate the next generation of chemists; to share the best available science on chemistry and toxicology with policy makers and the public; and to conduct interdisciplinary research at the intersection of health, chemistry, policy, and business. These are lofty goals, all of which will take time, says John Arnold, the head of the center and a professor of chemistry at the school.

“In the same way that it took a generation to change how people think about putting on a seatbelt or not smoking,” he says, “we’re not going to change things overnight. Legislation can’t do that, though it will certainly help push things in the right direction. You have to change hearts and minds, and that’s what we’re trying to do.”

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the graduate: Marty Mulvihill was still a doctoral student at Berkeley when he launched the school’s first green chemistry seminar series.

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n a Monday afternoon in early March, forty or so students—mostly graduate students in chemistry and engineering with a handful of public health and law students mixed in—file into a classroom in Etcheverry Hall.

They’re enrolled in Green Chemistry: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Sustainability, a graduate-level course taught by a team of experts from the schools of chemistry, natural resources, public health, and engineering, as well as Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. It’s the first course offered by the new center, and there’s a slight sense that everyone in the room is going someplace where no one has gone before. In the back row, the professors themselves sit, pens and notebooks ready, as Mike Wilson walks up to the podium.

Wilson’s job is to help connect the various disciplines that fall under the center’s umbrella. One of the driving forces behind its creation, he’s also a widely respected expert in public and occupa-

tional health and is often called on by the California legislature to write reports on the intersection of chemistry, public health, and environmental science and to testify before lawmakers. Today he is talking about the properties of various compounds and how people are exposed to them.

He recounts a startling firsthand experience that led him to champion the emerging field of green chemistry. While working toward his Ph.D. in occupational health, Wilson, a firefighter and paramedicturned-scientist, studied the workplace exposures of auto mechanics in the San Francisco area. Healthy young men suddenly found themselves suffering from severe peripheral nerve damage, to the point where some ended up in wheelchairs. The common link: they all worked in auto repair shops.

The culprit proved to be a commonly used brake-cleaning solvent that combined acetone and hexane, which react inside the human body to form altogether different molecules that destroy nerve fibers. The

when the law

went into effect, some 60,000 chemicals were in production and got a FREE Pass: no safety data required

mechanics were going through several cans a day, Wilson discovered, and though they often worked in garages that would be considered well ventilated, the properties of the toxic vapors caused them to hover under the cars where the mechanics were working for long enough to cause significant exposure.

To make matters worse, this combination of solvents had been introduced as an alternative to the carcinogenic chlorinated solvents that had been used before. But the manufacturer’s failure to consider fully how workers might typically be exposed to its product—and the lack of any rules that would force it to do so—led to disastrous consequences.

From the back of the room, John Arnold pipes up with a question. Was the switch from the earlier solvents beneficial? Were fewer workers falling ill overall? Students swivel in their chairs.

How could it be beneficial if humans were losing the ability to walk? But Arnold’s question reflects the reality of where chemistry, health, public policy, and business overlap today. The trade-offs that must be made often amount to settling for the best among a set of bad alternatives.

“Part of what we need to do is ask those big questions,” Arnold tells me later, “and we can’t do that if the chemists aren’t talking to the toxicologists and the economists and the people in public health.” Purely as a chemist, he says, he would have regarded hexane as a perfectly logical solvent. However, shouldn’t a chemist “at least be in the position when making a new compound or a better polymer to ask: What’s that going to do to people? How long is it going to be around? Is it going to end up in breast milk in Sweden?

We don’t think about that.”

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n Wednesday, class meets again. With her red curls pulled back and tucked behind her ears, Meg Schwarzman leans over the podium that holds her laptop and flashes her first slide. Schwarzman is a research scientist at the school of public health and a practicing physician. Along with Wilson, she was instrumental in the creation of the Center for Green Chemistry. Her topic today is how toxicologists identify the biological pathways that, when altered, raise the risk of disease.

“How do we know what hazards these things pose?” she asks.

“That’s toxicity testing.” She goes on to explain such fundamental concepts as the difference between morbidity (illness) and mortality (death). “Like, ‘I have cancer,’” she says, drawing a stick figure with a slumping head. The class laughs. “Or, ‘I am dead,’” she adds, drawing a stick figure lying prone.

Eight years ago, while Schwarzman was completing her residency training at the University of California, San Francisco, she was assigned to work in a clinic that served an area of the city that included one Superfund site and more than 100 brownfield sites. The rate of hospitalization from asthma there was five times higher than in surrounding neighborhoods. Handing out inhalers, she says, was like “trying to catch a tidal wave in a teacup.” Band-Aid medicine could not fix problems that were rooted in environmental exposures.

Schwarzman eventually gave up her job as a full-time clinician and went back to school to earn a master’s degree in environmental health.

She still sees patients once a week, but her focus has shifted dramatically, with most of her time now spent on research. In collaboration with Sarah Janssen, a physician and scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, Schwarzman has identified toxicity tests that could be used to determine whether a given chemical will alter a biological pathway relevant to breast cancer and so raise the risk of the disease.

Today she is talking to her class about phthalates, a class of chemicals found in a wide variety of substances—in fragrances, for example, and in certain plastics, such as rubber duckies, IV tubing, and credit cards, where they are used to strike the right balance between rigidity and flexibility. “Does everyone know what phthalates are?” she asks.

The group nods. In humans, she says, phthalates have been associated with higher rates of feminization of newborn boys. Cryptorchidism, or undescended testicles, is one of the most common birth defects in the United States, though it is typically corrected soon after birth.

Even so, the fix requires invasive surgery, and the condition has been linked to increased rates of testicular cancer and infertility. But how exactly do we point a finger at phthalates as the cause rather than mere coincidence? That’s where understanding the mode of action comes in.

In the case of phthalates, Schwarzman explains, the chemicals decrease the production of testosterone and insulin-like growth factor 3. The role of testosterone in male sexual development begins in the womb, where it is essential to forming the testicles and positioning them outside the body. Without enough testosterone, the developmental road map is altered, and feminization can occur.

While Wilson and Schwarzman’s lectures have raised some of the basic intellectual and ethical challenges that chemists must face, sitting in a seminar won’t give them the tools they need to design smarter, healthier products. They need basic lab skills and a functional understanding of the science of toxicology, translated into a language with which chemists are familiar—that of molecular structures.

Take oxidation, for example, says Marty Mulvihill, who is the summer 2011

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cover story executive director of the Center for Green Chemistry and responsible for developing its curriculum. Oxidation is one of the most common reactions that take place once a chemical enters the body. “Is it going to create a bad chemical?” Mulvihill asks. As chemists come to understand how particular molecular structures determine particular outcomes, he believes, they will begin to develop an intuitive sense for which new molecules may be toxic and which are likely to be more benign.

Mulvihill’s strategy starts with the lab experiments that freshmen like Adam Andrewjeski are conducting in introductory chemistry.

In early 2010, Mulvihill began to work with Michelle Douskey, a chemistry lecturer, to rethink undergraduate lesson plans. To teach students about mixing precise concentrations, they wanted to devise a task with some relevance to an 18-year-old. They decided to create biofuel. Now they’re further refining the experiment, asking students to use the waste products from the biofuel to make bioplastic.

In Mulvihill’s laboratory-cum-office, small yellow trays containing shards of plastic bear labels that reveal their chemical makeup. Different concentrations of glycerin and gelatin, for example, impart different physical properties, from hard and clear to foggy and rubbery. Nearby, there’s a small flask containing an orange liquid with bits of marinating pulp inside. “Carrots,” Mulvihill says. “We’re teaching students about dyes, so we want them to extract natural beta-carotene.” Why not consider where the dyes come from in the first place? Budding chemists need that basic awareness: they may work in isolation under fume hoods, but their products do not remain in that vacuum.

Mulvihill is also working with Chris Vulpe in the toxicology department of Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources to devise the school’s first graduate toxicology course specifically geared to chemists, which they intend to offer next spring. John Warner hopes that Berkeley will not only offer such a course but require it. He believes it will lead to more benign chemicals and products and also land students good jobs. Some 120 students went through Warner’s Ph.D. program in Boston, and all of them learned about the role that molecular structures play in determining potential toxicity. They also learned about designing molecules at room temperature using nontoxic solvents—saving energy and money on waste disposal costs. Those are just a couple of the basic principles of green chemistry that make students trained in the discipline appealing to employers, he believes. According to Warner, his students got jobs, on average, just three days after graduation.

technically affiliated with the Center for Green Chemistry, the initiative has funded some of the programs that got the center off the ground, including the first graduate seminar series on green chemistry and the development of the interdisciplinary graduate-level course Wilson, Schwarzman, and others in the center taught this semester.

Tony Kingsbury, a Dow chemical engineer and executive on loan from the company, currently oversees the sustainable products program at the Haas School. His post is temporary but, while here, he teaches classes and works with other researchers on campus to bring industry’s perspective to bear on identifying which big questions to pursue. “Dow has sinned in the past and we don’t deny that,” Kingsbury says. But the need for scientists who can think about safety in the first place is clear to company executives, he says, citing a case in which not doing so was harmful to the bottom line. Several years ago, Dow chemists developed a “superplastic”—perfectly clear and ultrastrong—only to discover that 1 percent of the population was allergic to the stuff. That’s millions of people and, in turn, millions of dollars of Dow’s research money down the drain. That may be pocket change to a behemoth like Dow, but the ability to dramatically reduce the risk of such losses simply by hiring savvier chemists has clear appeal. Kingsbury says Dow is eager to hire students who are trained to think in a more holistic, benign-by-design way.

The basic logic of training chemists to anticipate problems is hard

companies that

sell things like personal care products

have more to lose by ignoring the pressure to disclose the ingredients

for any company to argue with. “Nobody sets out to hurt people,” John Arnold says. “But inadvertently, they may do that through not knowing about toxicology or the bioaccumulation of a material.” Chemists, of course, are not the same as chemical companies, which may have financial motives for disregarding warning signs. But ignorance is a enign and efficient design is not the goal only huge part of the problem, and avoiding those mistakes saves time, of do-gooder idealists. Many major corporations are mov- money, and reputation—something that is increasingly important as ing swiftly to apply the principles of green chemistry to more consumers demand to know what’s in the products they buy.

Even in the absence of strong national policy and stricter regulation research and development initiatives.

“I can’t name a brand-name company that doesn’t have an internal of new and old chemicals, this consumer pressure is mounting. Newer, green chemistry program,” Warner says. Pfizer, Merck, DuPont, Dow: entrepreneurial companies such as Method and Seventh Generation all the big guys have them, he says, but “they don’t beat their chests are building their brands on safe, eco-friendly cleaning and personal care products—products that are proliferating on about it. One reason is that it’s a catch-22. If they visit onearth.org grocery store shelves. The biggest changes, howsay, ‘We’re going to make safe materials,’ well… to learn more about the links between toxic chemicals and cancer. ever, are unfolding less visibly at some of the largest that kind of acknowledges they weren’t making onearth.org/11sum/cancer brand-name retailers and manufacturers. them before. So many companies have decided to At Staples, the world’s largest office-supply chain and parent comdo it because it’s the right thing to do, not as a marketing tool but to pany to Staples Advantage, a separate $9 billion business-to-business make them more competitive.”

Dow, through its charitable foundation, has established a $10 million janitorial supply operation, change is well under way. “Customers are program in sustainable product design at the Haas School. Though not demanding this information,” says Roger McFadden, a chemist and vice

B

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as Clorox, SC Johnson, and Procter & Gamble—consumer pressure is leading to greater transparency in the disclosure of ingredients. In 2008 the American Cleaning Institute, a trade association for manufacturers of cleaning products, announced that its members would begin voluntarily disclosing ingredients. Clorox has now posted all ingredients used in its products on the company’s Web site, and SC Johnson has launched a dedicated site where consumers can search the company’s offerings by brand, product type, or chemical ingredient.

Dow’s Kingsbury is among those who believe the market will continue to shift in this direction. “Those with brands to protect care more,” he says. Unlike smaller companies that sell widgets to other businesses, those that sell things like personal care products have more to lose by ignoring the mounting pressure to come clean about all their ingredients, even if—or perhaps especially if—there are questions about safety.

Consumer services like GoodGuide, which rates products based on their health, environmental, and social responsibility bona fides, have played an integral role in pushing industry toward greater transparency. GoodGuide, which was founded by Berkeley associate professor Dara O’Rourke, has compiled a database of publicly available toxicological data on many thousands of chemicals. Some 700,000 people visit its Web site every month. Savvy consumers can search by brand or product type to find out how their preferred products—cleaning sprays, baby wipes, lipstick, even smartphones—stack up. For every searched product, the site displays a shortlist of higher-scoring alternatives. Even supposedly “green” manufacturers receive demerits in their rankings, O’Rourke says, for using vague and unregulated terms such as “naturally derived surfactant.” This summer, GoodGuide’s product rankings will begin to appear alongside products for sale through selected online retailers.

U

wearing two hats: On top of his duties at the Center for Green Chemistry, Mike Wilson is on call to assess chemical hazards at disaster scenes.

president at Staples. As a pass-through retailer, which sells products made by other companies—printers manufactured by HP, pens made

by Bic—Staples believes it has a responsibility to find out what’s in the products it sells. As expected, when the company requests ingredient disclosures and safety information from suppliers, hazard data are thin or lacking altogether. McFadden is quick to point out that some companies, including HP, do have that information and are eager to share it, making their products more appealing to informed customers.

Staples has developed its own line of safer cleaning products for its business-to-business operation, which serves 65 percent of all Fortune 100 companies. That label, Sustainable Earth by Staples, has seen considerable growth in recent years. At the same time, more companies doing business with Staples are asking for office and janitorial supplies that avoid specific substances of concern. These include chemicals that consumers already know about, like phthalates and BPA, but others are compounds that have largely flown under the public radar.

Staples is not alone. For other large, well-established brands—such

ltimately, consumer advocates like o’rourke and the folks at the Center for Green Chemistry are striving for more than just transparency. It’s the obvious next step: the use of safer alternatives. Two chemicals from the class of PBDEs, the flame retardants that Adam Andrewjeski was hunting down in the laundry room, have been voluntarily phased out. Once a suite of alternatives is on the table, it will be easier to let go of bad chemicals like these, even if they serve an essential purpose. Right now, however, there are no truly safe flame retardants on the market; there are only less-bad choices. The case of PBDEs highlights the need to design safer chemicals from the ground up.

John Warner has a back-of-the-envelope estimate for how this may all shake out. About 10 percent of the chemicals on the market are probably safe, he says. Perhaps another 25 percent can be phased out and replaced with safer alternatives that already exist. And for the remaining 65 percent? Well, he believes there are no alternatives yet that are safe enough. For that, we’ll need to head back to the lab and tap green chemists to invent benign molecules that will meet our needs.

“You can look at this and despair, or you can look at it and say, ‘What better time in history to be a chemist?’” he says. “Why doesn’t every kid want to be a chemist and have such important work to do? Not only having a good job, but also doing the most intellectually challenging thing you can imagine doing and saving the world at the same time.”

After seven years with OnEarth, Laura Wright Treadway has given up her day job for the freelance life. With this issue, she becomes a contributing editor. summer 2011

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PLEASE GE T BACK TO US The advanced biofuels industry, which is exploring ways of producing clean fuels from plant sources such as switchgrass and willow, as well as from algae, would benefit from a variable tax credit that rewarded better environmental performance.

This segment of the industry has remained on the sidelines during the debate over VEETC.

MAKING OUT LIKE BANDITS Ethanol blenders receive a tax credit of 45 cents for every gallon they mix with gasoline—and that’s to produce a fuel that gives drivers lower mileage per gallon than straight gasoline.

For Big Ag, ethanol subsidies have been a cash cow.

Although corn growers don’t receive subsidies directly, the ethanol industry is a reliable and expanding market, with higher demand translating into higher prices.

t h e c o r n MOB by lindsey konkel

illustration by Gary Hovland

Often used to help emerging industries grow and prosper, subsidies can be a valuable

tool for governments. In 1979, the Carter administration began to subsidize corn ethanol for two reasons: the oil crisis had spurred the search for alternative fuels, and farmers needed new markets to absorb record corn surpluses. Farmers and ethanol blenders benefit from three different forms of support: tariffs on imported ethanol; the federal renewable fuel standard (RFS), which mandates a rising volume of corn ethanol in gasoline; and, most important, a tax break known as the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit, or VEETC. Subsidies should become unnecessary when an industry is mature, but the lucrative corn ethanol industry has treated them as a permanent entitlement. VEETC—which cost taxpayers $6 billion last year—is set to expire at the end of 2011, and an unlikely coalition of opponents, in which greens and social justice activists find themselves aligned with Tea Party loyalists and the fast food industry, is now hoping to kill it for good.

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I’VE GOT A BEEF WITH YOU

DON’T FORGE T THE POOR

Organizations concerned with world hunger and social justice have joined the coalition calling for an end to VEETC. Groups such as Oxfam America and Africa Action have long argued that biofuel production is responsible for the high price of basic grains, exacerbating hunger in poor countries.

The corn used to make ethanol is not the same corn humans eat; it is the kind used to feed chickens, cows, and other livestock.

As increased demand for feed corn drives up the cost of business, dairy, meat, and poultry producers have become vocal opponents of corn subsidies.

HEADS WE WIN, TAILS YOU LOSE

I’M NOT LOVIN’I T

DON’T TREAD ON ME The congressional drive to end VEETC is led by Republican Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, a member of the Senate Finance Committee, as part of his broader campaign to rein in government spending. A number of Tea Party affiliates and libertarian groups have actively lobbied to end corn ethanol subsidies, which one such organization, FreedomWorks, describes as a “massive corporate welfare scheme.”

Groups such as the National Council of Chain Restaurants and the Snack Food Association oppose subsidies for much the same reason as the livestock industry: more expensive feed corn translates into more expensive Chicken Tenders and Big Macs.

Big Oil has a stake in both sides of the subsidies debate.

On one hand, it favors continued tax credits because it controls so much of the ethanol blending industry.

On the other hand, ethanol competes with gasoline as a fuel source, so oil companies would not be unhappy to see VEETC phased out. And of course government subsidies to the oil industry dwarf those granted to all other forms of fuel production combined. It’s not called Big Oil for nothing.

GREENER PASTURES Corn ethanol was supposed to be a clean alternative to gasoline. In fact, it has a long environmental rap sheet. Initial predictions of reduced greenhouse gas emissions were grossly over-optimistic, and the growing of corn for ethanol also contributes to a host of other problems, including water pollution, soil erosion, and forest and habitat destruction. NRDC, the Sierra Club, and other leading environmental groups want to end corn ethanol subsidies in favor of an energy policy that supports clean biofuels, wind and solar power, and other technologies that will help curb global warming, lessen dependence on foreign oil, save taxpayers money, and create more jobs.

NRDC experts Nathanael Greene and Sasha Lyutse blog about the fight over corn ethanol subsidies at http://switchboard.nrdc.org

detroit faces up to a smaller future

motown revival? by matthew power P HOTO G RA P HS B Y AN D RE W M OORE

i

n the late-afternoon sunshine

on Lakewood Street on Detroit’s East Side, Chuck Brooks is working on his castle. A stocky, bearded African American in a baseball cap and work clothes, Brooks runs a small construction company out of his house, and he and a crew are doing some renovations. He is also a preacher, attested to by the Bible verses he’s etched into the limestone and the Michigan plates on his white Cadillac parked at the curb: UPRAY4IT. Tucked into his belt are a measuring tape and a semiautomatic handgun.

Brooks keeps a toothpick in the corner of his mouth as he talks in sonorous cadences. “I was born and raised here, I’ve been a victim of crime here, and I’ve continued

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Stalled Car Wash CafĂŠ, East Jefferson Avenue, Detroit

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(((

blue-collar whites unloaded their homes at a loss, encouraged by a real estate industry that played up racial fears

to stay here,” he says. Brooks has been stabbed twice and shot twice, carjacked and nearly killed in front of his three children. And still he refuses to leave Detroit, a city that has long been a symbol of urban failure and decay, emptied of both population and hope. Why does Brooks stay? He gestures to the other tidy houses on his block. His presence, as he sees it, moves his neighbors to believe in this city, especially in its time of need. “It motivates people,” he says. “It motivates the lady next door to cut her grass, it motivates the mailman to deliver the mail.” Brooks is a man of faith, and faith for him begins at home.

He paraphrases a verse from 2 Chronicles: “I’ll hear from heaven, I’ll forgive their sins and heal their land. Well, He’s talking about Detroit.”

A few blocks away, on Waveney Avenue, the idea of answered prayers or healed land seems like a cruel jest. The concrete squares of a sidewalk have been pulverized by frost and swallowed by encroaching weeds. In a desiccated field of milkweed and aster a house has been reduced to a heap of charred lumber and shattered glass. Another is flame-gutted, its vinyl siding melted beneath a blackened window. All that remains of a long row of neighboring homes are evenly spaced middens of rubble, overgrown by thickets of buckthorn and mulberry.

The only sign of recent human endeavor is the road itself, the fresh blacktop laid down by some municipal entity with the Sisyphean task of maintaining a street grid that has long outlasted its utility. The only person visible is a man struggling with a shopping cart weighed down by a fire hydrant. Even among Detroit’s ruins there is some spirit of

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resourcefulness: organized gangs of such “scrappers” mine buildings for anything of value, from copper pipes and wiring to the brass fittings on hydrants, dismantling the city from within, piece by piece.

This block—and thousands like it—are evolving into what has been called urban prairie, the human landscape dissolving back into nature. Pheasant, fox, and raccoon populations have surged to fill an ecological niche abandoned by people. For the first time in nearly a century, and with much fanfare in the media, beavers have returned to build their lodges in the Detroit River, an ironic nod to nature’s industriousness in an area abandoned by industry. No corner of the city has been spared, and tens of thousands of structures stand in ruin, from the simple wooden bungalows of early autoworkers to the darkened neo-Renaissance skyscrapers of downtown Detroit. The vast Packard auto plant, derelict for more than 50 years, has a floor area the size of 60 football fields. So much structural steel has been cut from it by scrappers that the fire department no longer fights blazes there, fearing collapse. Illegal dumping is epidemic, with 300 sanitation employees patrolling 1,800 miles of streets.

For the people who have remained in the city, the statistics are no less grim. Detroit is America’s poorest large city, with a third of its citizens living in poverty. The violent-crime rate is the country’s seckeeping the faith Despite the mass exodus from the city, builder Chuck Brooks is renovating his home on Lakewood Street on Detroit’s East Side.

illustration by bruce morser

ond highest. Infant mortality is more than twice the national average.

More than a third of students drop out of high school. The official unemployment rate is 30 percent, but if one counts those no longer looking for work, the figure approaches 50 percent. In the Motor City, almost one-third of the population has no access to a private vehicle.

It has not always been thus: growing exponentially with the auto industry’s rise, Detroit was America’s fifth-largest city by 1950, reaching a postwar peak of 1.85 million. It has since suffered an inexorable exodus, losing 60 percent of its population, the first American city to rise above and fall below a million people. Oakland County, the overwhelmingly white suburb immediately north of Detroit’s 8 Mile Road, is among the wealthiest of its size in the country and has tripled in population since 1950. The region’s urban core has been utterly hollowed out.

That hollowing out has been imprinted on the cityscape, but for the people of Detroit, the release of the 2010 U.S. Census figures in March was an event anticipated with deep anxiety, exacerbated by rampant speculation in the news media. Given the state of the economy, particularly the collapse of the American automotive industry, few expected good news about the city’s fortunes, but the official numbers were starker than even the most dismal prognosticators had imagined: just 713,000 people lived within the city limits. Only Katrina-wrecked New Orleans had seen such a sharp decline. Detroit’s population has fallen to a level not seen since 1910, four years before Henry Ford drew an army of workers to his Model T assembly line with the promise of five dollars for a day’s labor. With Detroit’s economy now in shambles, nobody seriously believes that those people will return, and at the current rate of exodus the population will fall an additional 40 percent by 2030.

The reasons for Detroit’s decline are complex and manifold, including the exporting of American manufacturing jobs and a long history of poisonous race relations that led to “white flight” to the suburbs. Perhaps Detroit’s collapse was built into its very DNA: the city that more than any other embraced the singular potential of the automobile, undone by its own creation. Massive freeway projects, undertaken in the name of urban renewal, were bulldozed through the heart of African American neighborhoods like Paradise Valley and Black Bottom. Tensions boiled over with race riots in 1943 and 1967. Blue-collar whites with secure union jobs could afford to unload their homes in the city at a loss, a process encouraged by a real estate industry that played up racial fears. Detroit emptied straight down its new freeways, and since 1950 it has undergone a complete demographic turnover, from 80 percent white to 80 percent black, losing a million inhabitants in the process.

The effect on the city’s physical landscape has been profound.

Detroit occupies 139 square miles, and its infrastructure was built for a population, and a tax base, more than double its current size. All told, almost 20 square miles of Detroit’s land area—nearly the size of the entire city of San Francisco—has been abandoned, leaving a vast patchwork of blight spread across the cityscape. It is difficult to provide even basic services like police, fire, water, and sanitation to a population spread so thin.

“Detroit, I think, will come back,” Chuck Brooks says. How that will be done, given the physical facts of Detroit’s current situation, is the central existential question facing its citizens. The urban theory mantra of the twenty-first century is “density is destiny.” Cities are phenomenal economizers of scale, with far lower per-capita environmental impact than sprawling suburbs. The growing consensus of

nrdc

new industries for old

Henry Henderson Director of NRDC’s Midwest program, based in Chicago, and the city’s first commissioner of the environment

Is Detroit alone in suffering these seismic economic changes?

No, the same problems pop up throughout the industrial heartland, in cities like Gary, Indiana, and Youngstown, Ohio, and Chicago. These cities were the center of our manufacturing might for much of the twentieth century, and the Midwest is still the most energy-intensive part of the U.S. economy.

Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Michigan together constitute the fourth-biggest source of carbon emissions on the planet. But there are incredible synergies here between the battle to stave off the looming threat of climate change and the fight to fix our economy. Manufacturing the clean technologies that will offset our dirtiest energy sources can be a sort of “economic WD-40” to get the rust belt moving again.

At the same time, it sounds like an overwhelming challenge.

It’s a challenge, for sure, but the good news is that there are plenty of success stories from cities that are moving America forward into the new global economy. Take Newton, Iowa, which used to be home to Maytag and one of the biggest washing machine factories in the country. When Maytag left town, things looked dire. But a wind turbine company saw opportunities. With the infrastructure already in place and an experienced workforce, the company quickly converted the former Maytag factory to produce its massive turbine blades.

Then there’s Chicago, where the world’s largest urban solar farm now sits on a long-abandoned brownfield that was contaminated by years of industrial pollution. The solar farm company has restored the site and brought it back to productivity, creating jobs and clean energy in a community desperate for both. Or consider Toledo, Ohio, the Glass City. It used to be a powerhouse for producing car windshields; now the solar industry has stepped in to keep all those glaziers busy as the automakers have faltered.

How do we build on those experiences in other places?

The renewable-energy portfolios that NRDC has helped advance in many midwestern states are spurring demand for the technologies that can reopen shuttered factories. And a serious embrace of energy efficiency, which is another focus of our lobbying in the region, will involve all of the building trades, since retrofits must be done locally. This is not just about aesthetics: it is about building our future as citizens of healthy neighborhoods and a thriving nation.

summer 2011

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in the hopes of forging a workable plan, mayor bing invited the public to weigh in with ideas about the city’s future

many community organizers, city officials, and urban planners is that to survive, Detroit must embrace its new scale and become a leaner, more efficient city. That means adopting a policy of smart growth, with dense, pedestrian-centered pockets concentrated around transit hubs and the city center. The term often used by urban planners for bringing a city down to a more manageable scale is “rightsizing,” a word—not unlike “downsizing”—that comes heavily freighted.

“I’m not a euphemistic guy—the city is shrinking,” says Jeff DeBruyn, a 40-year-old community organizer who works in the Corktown neighborhood. “Detroit is going through a huge transition. It might be politically incorrect to say ‘shrink,’ but it must.”

How Detroit will shrink and what sort of city it will become is a key policy challenge for Mayor Dave Bing, the former NBA All-Star and business executive elected in 2009 on a promise to help the city reinvent itself. He has faced a colossal task, inheriting a city with a $320 million budget deficit. Dithering was not an option.

“If we don’t do it, this whole city is going to go down,” Bing told a local radio host when he was elected. “There is just too much land and too many expenses for us to continue to manage the city as we have in the past. There are tough decisions to be made. There will be winners and losers, but in the end we’ve got to do what’s right for the city’s future.”

The question of how those winners and losers would be selected stirred a deep mistrust in a city that still recalled the countless betrayals of urban renewal. For those determined to stay, it was hard not to wonder what their city would become and what role they would play in it.

In February 2010, a coalition of dozens of advocacy groups, community organizations, and government entities assembled by the Community Development Advocates of Detroit (CDAD) issued a detailed strategic framework for revitalizing the city’s neighborhoods. The plan envisions a cityscape classified according to 10 use categories, from “industry zones” and “urban homestead sectors” to “green venture zones” and “naturescapes.” The goal is a balance between economic prosperity, social equity, and environmental integrity.

A proposed light-rail project along Woodward Avenue, Detroit’s main drag, could serve as a backbone of economic development and green mobility in a city where only 8 percent of residents currently use public transit. Stability and growth in healthy neighborhoods could be encouraged; in areas of unrecoverable blight, habitat could be restored and long-buried streams and rivers could be “daylighted,” regaining their original flow to manage runoff and create recreation space. A new land bank could make use of some of the 42,300 cityowned parcels of land, spurring job development, green space, and urban agriculture. A city without a single national grocery chain has more than 600 community gardens, so why not turn a food desert into an example of food self-sufficiency? Rather than being a cautionary tale of hubris and decay, Detroit could shed the carapace of its history and be a model of sustainability and progress for other postindustrial cities.

While lacking the force of law, the CDAD recommendations did much to move forward the conversation about Detroit’s future. As a design challenge, they fired the imagination of Joan Nassauer, a landscape ecologist and architect at the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources and the Environment. Selecting a 200-acre site adjacent to the 5 0 onearth

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Conner Avenue Chrysler assembly plant, Nassauer had her graduate students draft wildly innovative landscape designs that worked within the CDAD framework. They envisioned urban homesteads with horse paddocks, managed forests of fast-growing poplars to be manufactured into fuel pellets, dense housing development interspersed with restored naturescape along key transit routes, archaic portions of the street grid erased. The potential savings in reduced services would be enormous, as would the long-term ecological benefits.

Nassauer disputes the oft-made claim that the development of green space in a dense urban core would only push sprawl and ecological impacts to the outer edge of the city. “That assumption is really flawed,” she says, citing New York’s Central Park as a prime example: “It created density on its edge.” The 200-acre Conner Avenue site could accommodate three times its current population and still have a significant amount of green space. “It’s all about design,” Nassauer says. “Once a design gesture has been made, people tend to forget that before the gesture was made, they hadn’t imagined it could be that way. The key thing is to get a vision out there.”

Of course, such visions often collide with inflexible economic and legal realities. The CDAD drafters acknowledged that they were only making recommendations and that fixing Detroit would be a “longterm process of change.” A great deal of will, both public and political, would be required to see the framework to fruition. And there would be many difficult questions. How would any plan be paid for in a city that was nearly broke? How could individuals be encouraged—or compelled—to uproot themselves for a plan no one could guarantee would work? Would land speculators, who have snatched up thousands of Detroit’s vacant lots, sue the entire process to a standstill? Would reducing services in abandoned parts of the city even be legal?

In the hopes of forging a workable plan, Bing assembled a team of advisers—experts in urban planning, development, and design—and announced a series of open forums at which the public could weigh in with questions and ideas about the city’s future. The Detroit Works Project, as Bing named the planning process, would proceed through stages of community feedback before announcing its conclusions and recommendations at the end of 2011.

A

t the first round of public meetings, in

September 2010, Bing was met with a massive turnout of angry constituents. At Detroit’s storied Greater Grace Temple, an overflow crowd of a thousand people showed up, many confronting the mayor directly with their skepticism about the process. “People were upset about a lot of things,” says Margaret Dewar, a professor of urban planning at the University of Michigan who attended the first chaotic meeting. “They were sure there was a secret plan and were determined to find out what it was.”

“There was a lot of propaganda and a lot of fear,” says Marja Winters, Detroit’s deputy director of planning and development. “There were a whole lot of stories in the media about shrinking: we’re going to relocate people, and people are going to be forced to move.” One local newspaper compared Bing’s unannounced plans to the Trail of Tears.

A second round of community meetings—subtitled “Phase 2:

out of the ashes In the shadow of the old Michigan Central Station, artists are converting these two derelict houses into a media center and exhibition space.

Making Tough Choices”—began early this year, and the organizers sought to avoid repeating their earlier missteps. At a half-filled auditorium on the western edge of Detroit, no means of communication had been overlooked. There was a digital projector for PowerPoint, a live blogger, a stenographer, a documentary film crew, even a signlanguage interpreter. Each chair had a multiple-choice voting clicker, so audience sentiment could be instantly tallied on a computer display.

Winters talked the crowd through a series of slides outlining the necessity of change in painful detail: graphs and pie charts showing the city’s population decline; the scale of abandonment; and the myriad economic, educational, and health crises facing Detroiters. Winters also highlighted Detroit’s historic potential and gave an update on areas of progress (hundreds of abandoned buildings demolished, a decrease in the murder rate).

It was an unassailably slick presentation, calibrated to show a degree of government responsiveness that would defuse charges of opacity and imperiousness. A lone heckler booed halfheartedly, but the event felt almost too stage-managed for the messy give-and-take of true civic engagement. One person asked, “If certain neighborhoods are expendable, what are the financial incentives to get people to move?” Winters replied that incentives were still being investigated, but on one point she was adamant: “There’s no portion of the city where we’re going to

cut off services.” She was at pains to remind people that the process was still under way, with no official decisions yet made, and it was clear that for the time being, many questions were going to be left unanswered.

A few days later, I asked Winters what rightsizing meant to her. “I think that word has very negative connotations. It can be taken the wrong way,” she said. “There’s not a magic density level,” she continued, pointing out that Detroit, at nine people per acre, actually has a higher density than Los Angeles. Rightsizing has to do with reaching a “service efficiency threshold”—a population density at which the city can afford to provide public services. Detroit’s threshold is 16 people per acre, and to reach that some residents will clearly have to move from the urban prairie.

Winters advocates a sort of carrot-and-stick approach, with incentive packages to lure people elsewhere and an outline of service reductions for those who insist on staying. As with many of the details about this project, meaningful numbers are hard to wring out of the organizers, and it’s not at all clear what financial and legal limitations they might face. Winters envisions an analysis that “will clearly outline, for neighborhoods that are targeted for relocation and for people who are going to stay, ‘Here’s what you can expect as relates to a change in your level of service.’” She cites such possible cuts as shifting trash collection from a 7-day to a 10-day cycle, but it is hard to fathom how the savings would be much more than a drop in the trash can for Detroit’s fiscal viability. And some of the most expensive services—police, fire, and ambulance—can’t legally be denied to any part of the city. summer 2011

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I

n Detroit, the logistics and consequences of

doing anything, or doing nothing, are profoundly complex.

In April, after months of ignoring Freedom of Information Act requests from the Detroit News, the Detroit Works Project released a trove of “policy audits”: thousands of pages of analysis commissioned by the city and paid for by the private Kresge Foundation, which is based in nearby Troy. While still lacking specifics about which neighborhoods would be affected, the documents justified the extreme difficulty of getting anything done in Detroit. The audits analyzed, among other things, the possibility of decommissioning roads, unplugging parts of the power grid to reduce maintenance costs, shutting down parts of the municipal water system. But for every recommendation there were correlative caveats that pointed out just how difficult change would be.

When discussing tearing up roads, for example, one audit stated: “Due to the significant costs to both deconstruct and reconstruct roadways, this approach should only be considered in areas where the prospect of future growth is very limited.”

Still, the project’s planners insist that the dismal census figures underscore “the logic of shoring up viable neighborhoods and shutting down the devastated ones.” The cruel paradox of such policies, says the University of Michigan’s Margaret Dewar, is that they risk punishing the very people who have stuck with the city longest. “They have hung on and made a place for themselves,” she says. “They are taking care of a whole lot of land that would just be derelict property

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summer 2011

growth spurt All across Detroit, residents have transformed abandoned lots into green space, creating as many as 600 community gardens.

and probably dumped on.” Ultimately, the colossal scale of disused space, some 12,000 publicly owned acres, is the problem from which all others stem. “There is no clarity of mission for citywide land development,” the audit states. “The quantity of surplus public land available vastly exceeds options for productive economic use.”

For some Detroiters, making productive use of the city’s empty places has become a calling, a means to heal their own land. In a collection of vacant lots on Georgia Street, Mark “Cub” Covington has created a bucolic community farm, nestled between the municipal airport and the Edsel Ford Freeway. On a warm fall afternoon he pulls up to the curb in a rusty pickup and surveys his Detroit pastoral.

Covington, a soft-spoken 38-year-old built like a linebacker, was born and raised on Georgia Street. He did a semester of college in Mississippi but “couldn’t stay away.”

After he lost his job as an environmental technician with a private company in 2007, he started taking care of the empty lots around his mother’s house, where the streets have flooded in the past when the storm drains clogged with garbage. “I thought I’d put a couple of rows of tomatoes and collard greens out here, because people wouldn’t dump on food,” he says. He started talking to neighbors he hadn’t talked to in years. “I realized there were a lot of people who were hurting for food,

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on a shuttered storefront, someone has rearranged the letters on a sign, transforming “auto parts” into “utopia”

people who couldn’t pay for their lights and gas and water,” he says.

“They were living without it. People couldn’t pay for their medicine.

So I just thought I’d make the gardens bigger.”

Covington started showing neighborhood kids how to work the land.

They built raised garden beds and planted a small fruit orchard with plums, pears, peaches, apples, and cherries. People from across the neighborhood come for free produce in the summer (no small benefit in a city where the death rate from heart disease is 48 percent higher than the national average). Covington has a talent for networking, and donations started trickling in, so he set up a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.

Today the Georgia Street Community Collective looks after 18 lots in the neighborhood. There is also a greenhouse, a chicken coop, and a goat named Cozy. A derelict house and corner store are being renovated into a community space and a computer education center.

But Covington is uncertain where his project will fit into the future plans for the city, which owns most of the garden lots and refuses to sell them. Even with more than 600 community gardens in Detroit and a wide network of greening groups and advocates, Covington recognizes the limitations of their efforts in the face of the structural changes that are needed. “Urban agriculture? It’s gonna be a small part of it,” he says. “It’s not gonna save the city. For one, there aren’t enough of us doing it. But in the meantime, you have all this open space. Why not grow some food on it? We hardly ever have anything left over.”

At the other end of the spectrum is John Hantz, a multimillionaire investor who made headlines in 2010 when he announced his plan to build Hantz Farms, the “world’s largest urban farm,” planting orchards and crops on up to 100 acres of blighted land a few miles from downtown. Hantz plans to invest $30 million to establish a for-profit urban agriculture research center in the heart of Detroit, creating hundreds of jobs. But critics, including many community gardeners, contend that his plan would allow him to bank city land at a much lower farm tax rate, that Michigan’s Right to Farm Act would shield his land from most municipal regulations, and that the menial jobs Hantz hopes to create would not foster the skills needed to rebuild the city’s economy.

There is also the broader question of whether large-scale commercial agriculture would have unintended consequences. There are serious questions about the health risks of commercial farming. Joan Nassauer cites the “very complicated land use legacies” of much of the city: leaded gasoline and paint, asbestos in building materials, PCBs in light fixtures, and all the chemical effluvia of a century of heavy industry.

In March, the Detroit city council granted Hantz permission to purchase 20 parcels, at a cost of $6,500, for a trial version of his grand urban farming vision. But Marja Winters, a supporter of community gardening, is skeptical. “Is urban agriculture a viable economic development strategy?” she asks. “That’s something we’re going to have to answer through this process.”

F

or decades, the night before Halloween

in Detroit was an orgy of destruction known as Devil’s Night, when hundreds of arson fires would be set in abandoned structures around the city. Beginning in 1995, thousands of volunteers banded together to guard buildings and

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patrol neighborhoods in a counter-event called Angel’s Night. That spirit of creative purpose in response to destruction seems key to Detroit’s survival, and a growing number of young artists, musicians, and activists have been drawn to the city’s plentiful space and do-it-yourself culture.

Last October 30, a crowd gathered for an art opening at the Imagination Station, a pair of derelict frame houses on the edge of the Corktown neighborhood, directly across from the soaring Beaux Arts ruin of the Michigan Central Station, built in 1913 and shuttered in 1988. (It is owned today by the billionaire Detroit businessman Manuel “Matty” Moroun, who also owns the nearby Ambassador Bridge to Canada.) The station, which draws comparison to the Coliseum, is perhaps Detroit’s most photographed landmark, an ornately carved memento mori of American ambition and prosperity. One of the houses that make up the Imagination Station was little more than an arsongutted shell, but Catie Newell, an architect and artist, built a delicate and evocative installation piece from its charred timbers. By making art out of the fragments of the city, she feels she is “doing something that has some sort of positive twist, rather than coming here to gawk at blight.”

Of course, a relatively small group of educated hipsters is not going to transform Detroit overnight, and it remains to be seen whether they are “art-nerd carpetbaggers,” as one blogger dubbed them, or are willing to commit to Detroit for the long haul and integrate with the community that already exists there.

“I want Corktown to be the model of urban sustainability, green development, and community participation for the whole country,” says the community organizer Jeff DeBruyn. At the same time, he knows that the flip side of rightsizing is going to mean many new people migrating into healthier neighborhoods like this one, putting pressure on the current community, which has seen the city through its darkest days. “You need to make them feel that this is still their city,” he says of the longtime residents, worrying that the city’s desire for stability and security will mean “we don’t care how we get there.” The stakes are too high, and this is a chance to do things right. There are profound challenges to unifying people across the vast reaches of the city: Mark Covington’s Georgia Street Garden is 10 miles from the Imagination Station. The central issue faced by grassroots groups is how to create a coalition in which everyone who cares for Detroit—including engaged private citizens like Chuck Brooks—feels he has a voice in the process.

On a shuttered storefront across the park from the Imagination Station, someone has rearranged the letters of a sign, transforming AUTO PARTS into UTOPIA. Utopia means “nowhere” in Greek, and the sign seems an apt commentary on Detroit’s current quandary, a city balanced between nowhere and somewhere, living and dying. In reality, cities rarely die. Hiroshima is still a city, Dresden is still a city. Whatever becomes of Mayor Bing’s grand plan, Detroit will still be a city.

Detroit’s official seal was designed to commemorate the fire of 1805, which burned the city to the ground. The seal bears the figures of two women. The figure on the left weeps in despair as she looks upon a city consumed by flames; the figure on the right comforts her, and gestures toward an image of the same city rebuilt. A motto in Latin reads: Speramus meliora/Resurget cineribus. We hope for better things/It will arise from the ashes. summer 2011

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welcome to the greenhouse edited by gordon van gelder OR Books, 348 pp., $17

future shock

I

As the world warms, science fiction writers lay out their visions of the dystopia to come by paolo bacigalupi

f you run your hand down the shelves of a bookstore, you’ll find a

wide range of contemporary fiction, categorized by reader fetish and with genres kept carefully separate. This one is “mystery,” that one a “romance,” another is a “thriller,” and that one over there? Well, it’s “literary.” But whether we’re talking about dragon tattoos or Da Vinci’s codes or fraught Thanksgiving reunions, contemporary novels all seem to share a certain binding principle. Even as they try mightily to distance themselves from one another, in fact, they’re all the same genre. They’re historicals.

While we debate what constitutes fictional trash and hash over the trendiness of present tense, great events are afoot. Carbon dioxide concentrations are rising. The world is changing. The stories that purport to describe our contemporary world are becoming a bit like mammoths in glaciers. They’re nicely detailed, but they’re also extinct. Even as these novels explore families and politics, landscapes and nature, murders and liaisons, global mean temperatures continue to jag upward. Permafrost melts. The ocean turns acid. Polar bears mate with grizzlies. Bark beetles chew their way north to new timber.

The tide creeps up the beach and over the dikes.

As Elizabeth Kolbert of New Yorker fame writes in her foreword to the short story collection Welcome to the Greenhouse, climate change is already in motion. The CO2 we’ve already dumped into the atmosphere means that we’re on a train rushing toward a strange future. There’s no stopping it. Our lives here and now have become historical—a snapshot sepia-tone moment between the way things were before

5 4 onearth s u m m e r 2 0 1 1

and the way they will be after.

But where are we going? And how might a storyteller engage with it? The answer lies in another part of the bookstore, that much– maligned ghetto of rocket ships and Barbarella, robots and Prime Directives: science fiction.

Despite its often silly pop culture referents, science fiction is actually the only literature with the tools for the job. The only genre that gathers up present data and then lunges forward into story, extrapolating the shape of a world that doesn’t yet exist but looms over the horizon.

When it works, science fiction provides a BabelFish translation not only of our potential futures but also of our present. George Or well gives us Big Brother, and William Gibson gives us cyberspace. As pure prognostication sci-fi often misses, but as a window into possibility and as a builder of vocabulary to describe the changes humans wreak upon their surroundings, it offers a chance at understanding the implications of our present in a way that other genres do not.

So how does science fiction do when it turns its gaze from interstellar travel to focus instead on global warming?

In Welcome to the Greenhouse, the editor Gordon Van Gelder assembles 16 science fiction authors and asks them to tell the stor y that is rendering all our other stories obsolete. The book provides a wide range of styles as well as a list of novels for further reading.

But first, a moment of candor.

Whenever I hear words like climate change attached to the word fiction, I admit I want to flee. The topic reeks of sincerity,

Hiroshi Nomura/Stone+

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heavy-handedness, and didacticism. I expect to be depressed.

Will it really tell me anything that I haven’t already chewed through in nonfiction form? Will it traffic in cliché? Will it recycle the Mad Max apocalypse scenarios of dog-eat-dog that always seem to ride along in the sidecar of collapse, whether we’re talking about nuclear devastation or biological plague or peak oil, or zombies dashing about moaning for brrraaaaaiiiiiiiinnnsssss?

Will it have Bandits?

Deserts?

People being REALLY MEAN TO EACH OTHER? Certainly some of the stories in the collection tread this postapocalyptic ground where scarcity and lawlessness are assumed to go hand in hand. Shotguns and ancient M-16s share equal space on the page with starving children and those few brave souls who hold tight to the threads of unraveling civilization. Some of these apocalypse stories are well drawn, but as windows into global warming, they’re so steeped in cinematic clichés of collapse in general that they don’t have much to tell us about the implications of climate change in particular.

That said, there are pleasures in this volume, and even more surprising, there are a couple of laughs. Early in the book, Matthew Hughes tells the stor y of Bunky Sanson, the prototypical Competent Man of science fiction’s own dusty history, a man who can invent his way out of anything. Bunky goes after climate change with all the optimism of today’s industrial giants or geo-engineering proponents. As the farce closes, Bucky is devoured by massive, alien, dinosaur-like birds, which agree with him that global warming is in fact “not a problem.”

Other stories offer humane obser vations of people and a changing landscape, as in Judith Moffet’s “Middle of Somewhere.”

After a tornado levels an isolated

farmstead, a young girl and the woman who mentors her work at survival while waiting for help to arrive. The story spends most of its time focused on what’s in the pantry and wounded baby birds, but climate change lurks around the edges. Tornado Alley has diversified, expanding into Hoosier Alley and Dixie Alley, and tornadoes are becoming more commonplace as well as moving farther north every year.

f r o m

o u r

Br uce Sterling provides a poignant political fable of a sustainable society where people “would spill their own blood before they would spill a drop of water,” and whose closedsystem greenhouse survival depends on “pergolas, sunshades, reflectors, straw blankets, pipes, drips, pumps, filters, cranes, aqueducts,” and, above all, “the Cistern.” They examine the lost artifacts of history, occasionally

reviving devices such as the “external combustion engine” to watch its “tremendous, headlong, urgent whizzing speed.” No one knows why the engine spins, or to what purpose, but they know that it destroyed things “so completely that we, their heirs so long after, can scarcely guess at the colossal shape of the world that they wrecked.”

And there are others. Ray Vukcevich’s “Fish Cakes” shows

c o n t r i b u t o r s

Seven new books showcase OnEarth’s stellar roster of writers and photographers

Three

By Ed Kashi, powerHouse Books, $45 Triptychs have been around since the Middle

Ages. To amplify the meaning of the Crucifixion, for example, painters might flank the central image with portraits of saints or other episodes from the life of Christ. The photojournalist Ed Kashi updates the idea of the triptych for the digital age, in which, he writes in his preface, “our ability to take in more than one image at a time has become innate.” Kashi combed through 25 years of his work to combine apparently disparate subjects—a deserted farmhouse in Northern Ireland, for example, juxtaposed with a scene of cattle grazing in South Dakota and another of a car and a hay bale on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation—to create composite images that are alternately moving and unsettling.

Plastic: A Toxic Love Story

By Susan Freinkel, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $27 Freinkel tells the story of our relationship with plastic through eight emblematic everyday objects—comb, chair, Frisbee, IV bag, disposable lighter, grocery bag, soda bottle, and credit card.

Once and Future Giants

By Sharon Levy, Oxford University Press, $24.95 In a book that began life as an OnEarth story in 2006, Levy asks what ice age extinctions can tell us about the fate of our largest

animals as humans usurp the world’s last wild places.

Swan: Poems and Prose Poems

By Mary Oliver, Beacon Press, $23 In her twentieth volume of poetry, the Pulitzer Prize– winner offers profound insights into the beauty and mystery of the natural world.

Everything Happens Suddenly

By Roberta Swann, Cervena Barva Press, $15 Few poets have the emotional range of Swann, who moves effortlessly from black despair to radiant happiness.

American Eden

By Wade Graham, Harper, $35 A frequent chronicler of California politics for OnEarth shows his versatility with an engrossing, lavishly illustrated history of the American garden from Thomas Jefferson to Martha Stewart.

Sex and the River Styx

By Edward Hoagland, Chelsea Green, $27.50 In his latest collection of audacious and gorgeously written essays, Hoagland tackles the great themes of aging, love, and sex in the most unexpected ways.

summer 2011

onearth 5 5

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us a future America where people hide from their changed climate and even the most basic physical facts of their world with the help of Second Life–like social applications that create a virtual world more palatable than the one immediately around them. “The Men of Summer,”

by David Prill, is a fable about a world where the shallow-sweet romances of summer never end, because summer itself never ends either. George Guthridge’s “The Bridge” provides a wrenching portrait of Alaskans and their collapsing culture as the seas rise around their island chains, and outsiders pay money to ride the emotions of loss that the natives experience.

In “Eagle,” by Gregory Benford, ethics, ecoterrorism, and geo-engineering collide around a last-ditch attempt to control global warming by dumping hydrogen sulfide into the air above the North Pole, and in Joseph Green’s “Turtle Love” we watch a family as their house is condemned by legislation akin to eminent domain that determines which areas are worth protecting with a seawall.

Some stories feel clunky. A few have that whiff of infodump preachiness that often accompanies an attempt to compress a complex topic into the confines of a short story. But unlike most of what we call contemporar y literature, they are also intensely engaged, not with the future, which is what we all imagine science fiction is worried about, but with the present. They’re asking questions about the story that will shape all our other stories from here to forever. They don’t smell historical; they smell of a newbor n creature, wet and ungainly, uncertain of its ultimate 5 6 onearth s u m m e r 2 0 1 1

development, but also a start.

And a genuine one, at that.

Toward the end of the collection, Paul DiFilippo gives us another moment of cheer in “FarmEar th,” where people micromanage and tr y to heal our ver y damaged Gaia through video-game interface. They jockey swarms of oil-eating bacteria through the ocean deeps and vaccinate wild horses and grow carbonsink forests in an attempt to mitigate human damage to the planet. A group of kids, bored with their menial FarmEarth tasks, hack their way up to master level so they can do the really cool jobs like draping skyscrapers with vertical farms and swooping through the stratosphere to sequester airborne pollutants. And of course, hijinks ensue.

The story is fun and sweet, and it’s also frightening how much we cling to a story like this in a tome about global warming. It seems to affirm that children will still be children and that even in a devastated future, thrilling antics await. We want that affirmation. We are desperate and grateful for it. And our storytelling methods respond to that basic human hunger.

Fiction, by its nature, is optimistic. Even the most apocalyptic of the scenarios in this book contain people. Fiction is an artificial construct in itself, in that it presumes that there is a story to tell, with its protagonists and antagonists and arc of discovery, or learning, or change.

My biggest fear as I turn the pages of this book is one left unspoken—that fiction itself is extinct. That in the future there will simply be no tale to tell.

Paolo Bacigalupi’s novel Ship Breaker (Little, Brown Books for Young Readers) was a 2010 National Book Award finalist.

the beekeeper’s lament How One Man and Half a Billion Honey Bees Feed America BY hannah nordHaus Harper Perennial, 336 pp., $14.99

Modern beekeeping is a

strange pursuit, and not just because its practitioners choose to make their living caring for creatures that have poison stingers on their backsides. Bees pollinate our crops and make honey by doing what comes naturally, yet their lives have come to take a very artificial course. As the Colorado-based journalist Hannah Nordhaus writes in her new chronicle of commercial beekeeping, “the age of mass production has not been kind to bees.”

The media have swarmed on the story of colony collapse disorder, or CCD, in which bees just disappear from their hives, leaving behind untended honey and a lonely queen. Reporters interested in the spooky malady have often called John Miller, one of the nation’s top beekeepers, who jocularly calls the puzzling constellation of symptoms PPB, for “piss-poor beekeeping” (although CCD has hit his colonies too).

Miller proved to be such a good source—“someone who cared passionately about something strange and had a talent for expressing it”—that Nordhaus decided to build a book around him.

He is the Virgil of the piece, our guide through the nine circles of hell that are modern beekeeping.

Miller is a quirky Mormon who writes poetic e-mails, bounces with excitement, and reacts to the stings that come with his job with an effusion of what he calls “cowboy words.” And the business is as weird as he is.

If you eat, you should care about the plight of the bees. “One in every three bites of each summer’s harvest,” Nordhaus says, is pollinated by the tiny billions that make up the rickety, stressed, and decidedly odd bee industry. Commercial bees are jostled, medicated, alternately fed corn syrup and halfstarved as they are trucked across the country on annual migrations to pollination opportunities. And their intense concentration every year in the almond fields of California means that bee diseases, from the reddish varroa mites that crawl on their backs to bacterial foulbrood, can spread quickly across the nation’s “bee herd.”

Scientists are still working out the chain of events that leads to empty hives, but they are unlikely to find a single culprit. Instead, and unsatisfyingly, the phenomenon probably reflects “some sort of interaction between pathogens and variables such as nutrition, weather, varroa mites, pesticides, and the modern insults of longdistance beekeeping,” Nordhaus writes. It’s understandable, then, that she made her book a character study rather than a whodunit about colony collapse disorder.

CCD is, however, symbolically rich, and Nordhaus not only sees dying bees as “symbols of environmental sin” but uses the image of bees’ abandoning their homes to excellent effect as a metaphor for the hollowing out of the Great Plains as farms consolidate and farmers age. Yet before the loss of honeybees, there was another loss, one that, surprisingly, she alludes to only in passing—that of the wild

insects and birds that once did the pollinating in America “but have been driven to near extinction by pesticides and habitat loss.”

“Farmers expect bees to function like just another farm machine,” Nordhaus writes. “But bees are living things.” And it turns out that even bees in boxes need nature to thrive. Researchers are finding that corn syrup or monoculture crops that briefly flower and then disappear won’t do for the bee. Bees need “wild meadows, untamed, unsprayed meadows, meadows where flowers flourish all summer in an everreplenishing weedy bloom.” John Miller has recently decided to skip the corn syrup in favor of leaving his bees more of their own honey to tide them over to spring. Modern agriculture may need the bee, but the bee most decidedly does not need modern agriculture.

—emma marris

powering the dream The History and Promise of Green Technology

BY Alexis Madrigal Da Capo, 400 pp., $27.50

Illustration by blair thornley

Here’s a shining vision:

great turbines harness the tidal power of the Pacific coast, meeting 100 percent of San Francisco’s energy needs. Whole subdivisions of New York and Chicago are built with solar heating. The Great Plains are blanketed by

800,000 windmills. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) conducts “a bioprospecting effort like no other in our nation’s history,” finding ways to create biodiesel from the fat that algae accumulate in their cells.

The future? No, the past. San Francisco experimented with tidal turbines in 1895; New York and Chicago built their solar homes in 1947; the Plains were covered with windmills in 1950; NREL launched its pioneering work on algae in 1978. To Alexis Madrigal, a senior editor at the Atlantic, each of these stories is a parable, each carrying the same message: we have been here before, and often. The history of American society is in large part the history of technology, and the great underlying question is whether we can understand “what forces drove what, who benefited, what was gained, and what was lost.”

Madrigal asks why our dreams of renewable energy have run repeatedly into blind alleys—until, perhaps, now. Each of these visionar y episodes ultimately foundered because it could not be scaled up to the mass market.

Sometimes that was because the technology didn’t advance rapidly enough; sometimes it was because governments lost interest; sometimes it was because powerful vested interests strangled the new baby in the cradle. (That one has never gone away, of course.)

The stor y of Miami, where 80 percent of new homes built between 1937 and 1941 came with solar water heaters, is probably the most eloquent of Madrigal’s case studies. What happened here was that the initiative was crushed by the greater power of electric utilities and real estate developers. The initial purchase price of a conventional electric home was marginally lower, even though it would cost the homeowner more over time.

For a brief period in the 1970s, all the right stars seemed to be

coming into alignment. The first Earth Day and a slew of new environmental laws had brought a new consciousness to the land. The first oil shock was an urgent wakeup call about our addiction to fossil fuels. Jimmy Carter was elected.

Miraculously, Denis Hayes, one of the creators of Earth Day, was appointed to head the federal government’s new Solar Energy Research Institute (SERI)—by a Republican energy secretary!

Imagine that. But then Carter was no more, off came the solar panels from the White House roof, and SERI’s budget was cut in half.

Under President Reagan, coal, oil, and nuclear became the flavors of the month, and we’re still digging ourselves out of the wreckage.

But we now have another moment of opportunity, Madrigal says. The reasons are various: climate change is our generation’s oil shock, only bigger; the federal government is again interested in subsidizing alternatives; venture capitalists are ready to invest billions; and we have renewable projects on the drawing board, and even operating in the field, on a much larger scale than ever before.

Scale: that’s the key word, and it’s where Madrigal’s argument gets most interesting. Without

achieving scale, the price of renewables will never come down enough to compete with coal (which benefits, of course, from massive hidden subsidies, since the environmental and public health damage it causes has never been factored into its cost). Renewables must be cheaper. Google has a formula for this: RE < C. To any serious student of energy markets, the need for scale is self-evident. But to many environmentalists, Madrigal argues, it may be counterintuitive—even culturally repellent. It may mean placing our renewable energy future in the hands of people like the venture capitalist John Doerr, who says, “I’m a raging capitalist.

My job is to make a lot of money.”

And realizing our dream may mean accepting massive industrial projects like BrightSource’s 400-megawatt Ivanpah thermal solar array in the Mojave Desert—the “Saudi Arabia of solar.”

What’s more important, Madrigal asks: phasing out fossil fuels or saving the threatened desert tortoise? Though he delivers it with sympathy, and even with some ambivalence, Madrigal’s message could not be more provocative. We may not be able to have it both ways.

—george black

Farewells Even as the days are growing longer they’re passing by with such rapidity they might be water hurtling down a mountain.

Tell me if you will why names and dates, which seem so static in the histories, are rushing past this stationary point as though they had a mission that concerned me but all the same were bidding me farewell.

—B y B en H owa r d

summer 2011

onearth 5 7

Dispatches news and views from the natural resources defense council

about time Neglected for decades, residents near a toxic site in New Jersey finally get results.

environmental justice storms the gates A blighted community in Jersey City, New Jersey, sues a multibillion-dollar company to clean up its mess

W

hen you peer through the chain-

link fence at 900 Garfield Avenue in Jersey City, New Jersey, you will notice that concrete slabs occupy the space where buildings once stood. Nearby, blue and green tarps cover mounds of dirt. More remarkable, however, is what you canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t see: beneath the surface lie 700,000 tons of chromium waste that has been present on the 16.6-acre site for more than 50 years, seeping into the soil and groundwater and escaping into the air as dust.

Chromium ore is an amazingly useful substance. When processed and added to steel, chromium produces stainless steel; when applied as a coating to boats, planes, and cars, it protects their surfaces from rust. This work was done by PPG Industries for 40 years, until the

5 8 onearth s u m m e r 2 0 1 1

Garfield Avenue facility was shuttered in 1963 and manufacturing was shifted to a newer plant in Texas. Left behind were high concentrations of hexavalent chromium, a known carcinogen that, when inhaled or ingested, can cause lung cancer, gastrointestinal bleeding, ulcers, respiratory problems, and low birth weight. Now, after decades of failed attempts, a legal settlement among NRDC, local community groups, and PPG, which is based in Pittsburgh, will finally bring about a thorough cleanup of the contamination.

Chromium pollution is a national problem. Erin Brockovich made her name seeking legal reparations for a Hinkley, California, community that suffered health consequences from hexavalent chromium in its water supply; the battle she waged against Pacific Gas and Electric in the1990s became the basis of the film starring Julia Roberts, who won an Oscar for her performance as Brockovich. Even today, about half

of California’s drinking water is tainted by chromium, which has also killed off aquatic life in the harbors of Baltimore and Boston.

Garfield Avenue is one of more than 130 chromiumcontaminated sites in heavily industrialized New Jersey, and one of the largest. The settlement, according to Nancy Marks, a senior attorney who led NRDC’s legal team, could open the door for effective remediation of other sites. “I’m hoping that this will be part of a general clamping down on hexavalent chromium nationwide,” she says.

Like many such contaminated sites in the United States, 900 Garfield Avenue sits in the middle of a low-income community where the majority of residents happen to be people of color. They have had to tolerate yellow pools of chromium-tainted water seeping into their basements when it rains.

“Had this been a more affluent community—a whiter community—this would have been handled differently,” asserts Joe Morris, an organizer with the Interfaith Community Organization

Did You Know…?

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left: reed young; right: Courtesy of the compound (www.compounddesign.com)

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(ICO), a local group that sought out NRDC in 2005 to help wage its legal battle against PPG. By then, the fight to clean up the site had already dragged on for 23 years, during which time the state of New Jersey negotiated, but failed to enforce, several agreements with the company.

“Both the company and the state have a long track record of failure at this site,” says Al Huang, an environmental justice attorney at NRDC. Marks and Huang worked closely with ICO and other local organizations to bring legal action against PPG. “The community defined its expectations for justice, and our role was to use the law to achieve those goals,” Huang says.

The cleanup will cost PPG hundreds of millions of dollars and take an estimated five years to complete. New Jersey usually requires that polluters reduce chromium levels to 20 parts per million, but this settlement requires PPG to reduce levels to five parts per million. The agreement also requires PPG to fund the salary of a consultant knowledgeable about chromium contamination, who will be hired by the community to represent its concerns during the cleanup and monitor the progress. In addition, the settlement allows residents living in the vicinity to have their property assessed for contamination; if chromium exceeds safe levels, PPG will have to clean up those sites, too.

The clean-up at 900 Garfield Avenue begins this spring, finally bringing residents relief after more than a quarter of a century. Yet more than 600 Superfund sites around the country remain contaminated with chromium. The victory forged

by NRDC and its local partners sends a strong message to similarly afflicted communities that they need not tolerate the toxic legacy of industrial pollution.

—rose eveleth

meet the food pioneers

E

ntomologist and

entrepreneur Pam Marrone remembers the time moths invaded her family’s garden. When her father sprayed a prized dogwood tree to ward them off, Marrone was dismayed that all the bees died, too. She says she knew then that she would go on to study entomology. the lunch lady “I’ve been wanting to kill pests Chef Ann Cooper without chemicals since I was about 8,” she says. Now, as the founder of Marrone Bio Innovations, she is doing just that. In late April, presenting her with the 2011 Growing Green Award in the business category, NRDC recognized Marrone for her pioneering work producing biopesticides that don’t harm workers, consumers, or the environment. The company’s sales are expected to climb to $8 million in 2011, double the figure in 2006, its first year.

“Our products lead to better results and higher yields, so they’re replacing chemical sprays in conventional farming,” she says. “This is the product that can meet the need for increased food production in the most sustainable way.” Other 2011 winners are Jim Cochran, the first organic strawberry farmer in California; Ann Cooper, an advocate for fresh, nutritious school lunches; and Molly Rockamann, who teaches urban dwellers to grow their own food (see “She’s All That,” page 22).

Judges for the 2011 awards included the acclaimed author Michael Pollan, the award-winning chef Dan Barber, the organic food advocate and media mogul Maria Rodale, and Tom Tomich, who founded the Agricultural Sustainability Institute, which promotes research and education throughout the University of California system.

For Ann Cooper, this year’s winner in the knowledge leader category, sustainable change may visit onearth.org begin with food production, but it to meet Growing Green Award winner Jim Cochran, California’s pioneering continues with food preparation in organic strawberry grower. school lunchrooms across Ameronearth.org/11sum/cochran ica. Cooper took a winding path to the cafeteria: she graduated from the Culinary Institute of America and served as executive chef on a cruise ship before moving to Vermont and getting involved in the local food movement. In 1999, when she was asked to consider an executive chef position at a school in East Hampton, New York, she balked. “What, me? Lunch lady?” she remembers thinking.

“No way.” But then she had a change of heart. “We’re killing our kids with food. Children today are at risk of dying at a younger age than their parents,” she says. “It’s pretty clear we need to fix this.”

More than a decade later, Cooper proudly calls herself the Renegade Lunch Lady. With her Food Family Farming (F3) Foundation, she is on a mission to make the country’s children healthier through two main projects. The first, a partnership with Whole Foods, is bringing salad bars to hundreds of school cafeterias; the second, a new Web site called The Lunch Box, arms schools with free recipes and resources to eliminate processed foods from meals without raising costs.

“Access to healthy food is the social justice issue of our time,” Cooper says. “Who wants to live in a country where you have to be —lauren F. friedman rich to be healthy?”

summer 2011

onearth 5 9

BETWEEN THE LINES

Let’s Stick to the Facts, Shall We?

Early this year, Thomas Anderson, a Republican representative in the New Mexico State Legislature, introduced H.B. 302. While the bill waxed poetic about teachers’ rights and academic freedom, NRDC and like-minded groups saw it as part of a statewide campaign to fight environmental protections by shunning scientific facts. The House Education Committee tabled the bill with a 5–4 vote in February, but similar bills have been introduced in other states.

This bill tried to protect teachers not inclined to teach evolution or climate change as accepted science. We fought it along with other anti-climate bills, but this one took a broader and more subtle approach, since it wasn’t specifically attacking the state’s climate and energy regulations. Fortunately, it didn’t go anywhere.

Neither evolution nor climate change is controversial among scientific experts. They have been made controversial because of an ideological or political agenda. First you say it’s controversial, then you say you shouldn’t teach it because it’s controversial. It’s a circular argument.

The fact that climate change is linked with the teaching of evolution takes us back to the days of the Scopes monkey trials.

This is a push-back against science. The fossil fuel industry is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to confuse, deceive, and frighten the American people about this important issue. And it’s having some effect.

The debate about what topics to teach—or not teach—in our science curriculum is missing the point a bit. In the American educational system, we should be teaching the scientific method, exposing students to the best available data, and teaching them to think on their own.

Laura Sanchez Climate and Energy, NM

Dan Lashof Climate Center, DC

Bob Deans Communications, DC

Lisa Suatoni Oceans, NY

6 0 onearth s u m m e r 2 0 1 1

Honorable Man John Adams, NRDC’s founding

director, paid a visit to the White House on February 15 to receive the nation’s highest civilian honor: the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Adams, who helped found NRDC in 1970, was recognized for his decades-long commitment to protecting the environment. Other recipients included President George H. W. Bush, the investor Warren Buffett, and the congressman and civil rights leader John Lewis.

“This is one of the things that I most look forward to every year,” President Obama told the 15 honorees and their invited guests at the East Room ceremony. “It’s a chance to meet with—and more importantly, honor—some of the most extraordinary people in America and around the world.”

In his tribute to Adams, the president highlighted his achievements as the longest-serving director of any environmental group in the nation: “NRDC has won landmark cases and helped pass landmark laws to clean up our air and water, protect our forests and wildlife, and keep our climate safe.”

Carol Browner, then a White House adviser on energy and climate, called Adams in November to inform him of the award. But before she could get out the news, he began to make his case against hydrofracking in New York’s Catskill Mountains. Adams laughs about the conversation now: “I’ve made it my obligation to stand up for nature, and sometimes you’ve —r. e. only got a second.”

left: Deans and suAtoni: anthony clark; above: Paul Morse

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SWITCHBOARD:// Online news analysis

An Ethical Fix In December 2004, 127 young

http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/lmonroe/breath_hold_diver_goes_nose-to.html

Every year, tens of millions of sharks are killed just for their fins, which are used to make soup. Fins are commonly harvested from living sharks, whose bodies are then dumped back into the water. Many are still alive when they are thrown back, but without fins they cannot swim and die a slow death. Sharks play an important role in ocean ecosystems, but their numbers have been decimated by habitat loss and fishing. Leila Monroe, an attorney in NRDC’s oceans program, writes about William Winram, a diver, photographer, and shark advocate, and about a new California law aimed at decreasing demand.

William floats silently—breath held, his whole body exposed, face-to-face with a gigantic tiger shark. Why has he presented himself, unarmed, to the jaws of this massive apex predator? Among other reasons, William and his colleague, Fred Buyle, are producing documentary films to educate the public about the most misunderstood creatures of the sea and raise awareness of the threats that put many of the world’s sharks in grave danger.

show us your nature

Shark fin soup has been a popular Chinese dish for years because of its association with prestige and privilege. But without regulation, fishermen who harvest the fins throw the nearly valueless carcasses of the sharks overboard; only about 2 percent to 5 percent of the animals’ bodies are utilized. Now many people are pledging to help protect sharks and honor traditional tenets of Asian philosophy that emphasize the importance of harmony between nature and humanity. A growing number of nations have outlawed the removal of shark fins onboard fishing vessels. Some governments and businesses in the Pacific region have agreed not to serve shark fin soups at official functions, business meetings, or celebratory banquets.

A bill was introduced in the California State Assembly that would ban the possession, sale, trade, and distribution of shark fins in the state. The bill is evidence that concerned citizens, businesses, and decision makers are standing up for a simple change that could help ensure the survival of these powerful creatures.

Submit your photos at onearth.org/photocontest

A CRITTER FROM DOWN UNDER Paula Marsili was working as a massage therapist at an Australian Open warmup tournament when she took a break to go to the Brisbane Zoo, where she met this napping koala. It’s generally hard to catch these cuddly marsupials when they’re awake—they sleep up to 20 hours a day.

adults were paid $15 an hour to inhale chloropicrin, a pesticide that is also used in tear gas and chemical warfare.

The research subjects—who stood for extended periods in a chamber filled with its vapors and also had it shot into their eyes and noses—were not given that information.

Historically, the Environmental Protection Agency has relied on animal studies to determine appropriate limits for human exposure to pesticides. In an attempt to increase the levels deemed safe, pesticide manufacturers began testing the bug-killing toxins directly on humans.

Under the Clinton administration, the EPA banned testing pesticides on humans, but in 2003 a federal court lifted the ban for procedural reasons. “That’s when we started to come down hard on these studies,” says Jennifer Sass, a senior scientist at NRDC. “There were ethical deficiencies in terms of coercion and the lack of informed consent.”

Congress temporarily reinstated the Clinton-era ban in 2005, and the next year, the EPA issued a new rule that it said would safely regulate human pesticide tests. But NRDC attorneys found that the rule failed to implement proper scientific standards, didn’t apply to all relevant studies, and included loopholes that could allow testing on children and without fully informed consent.

When the agency refused to close the loopholes, NRDC sued. As part of the settlement, the EPA is now considering public comments on a new rule, which must be finalized by December 18. —L. f.

summer 2011

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fieldwork

who we are

what we do

School. As an advocate for protecting federal public lands in the American West, she has prevented oil and gas drilling off California’s coast and successfully sued the second Bush administration for its proposed lease-sale of more than 100,000 acres of Utah’s Redrock wilderness for oil and gas extraction. But a few years ago, the focus of her work took a distinct turn, challenging her environmental values in ways she never imagined.

She discovered that hundreds of applications for large-scale

ment agencies, and developers to identify areas where the least environmental impact would occur.

“In the beginning, I lost sleep,” Wald admits. “I was trying to go from someone who thought of herself as a protector to someone advocating for utility-scale projects. It’s been very challenging.”

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the BLM have designated areas where development is restricted, such as critical habitat for endangered species.

But different agencies manage different territory with varying

Eyes on the west Johanna Wald has devoted her career to protecting wild places.

Striking a balance A lifelong wilderness advocate helps ensure that large renewable energy ventures end up in the right locations

I

erika brekke

n the summer of 1965, Johanna Wald stood next

to her husband at the foot of a 2,100-year-old giant sequoia, holding their infant daughter. They were visiting Yosemite National Park in California for the first time and were among the tourists gathered around the Wawona Tree, famous for the tunnel cut out of its trunk that allowed cars to pass through.

Wald remembers overhearing an elderly woman standing nearby, telling a story to her own family about how, as a young child, she passed through that very tree in a horse-drawn wagon.

“That was when I fully understood the kind of bond people could have with a place,” recalls Wald, who is now a senior attorney with NRDC’s land program in San Francisco.

Wald began her long career in 1972, joining NRDC in its first West Coast office in Palo Alto, California, soon after completing Yale Law

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S u mm e r 2 0 1 1

renewable energy projects, like solar farms, had been filed with the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) by developers. These projects would cover thousands of acres and require the construction of new transmission lines, many in areas untouched by development. It was also becoming increasingly apparent that climate change could dramatically transform the wild lands she had spent her life protecting.

“Everything I had been working for was at risk from one of those things: climate change or this relatively new threat, poorly sited energy projects,” Wald says.

Soon she began working full-time on establishing methods for identifying the best places to develop large-scale renewable energy projects in the West, knowing that these were necessary to “make a significant dent in our greenhouse gas emissions.”

Wald now works with other environmental groups, govern-

levels of protection, making siting complicated.

Last year, the Obama administration issued permits for six large solar energy projects in California. While each project will take several years to complete, Wald and others continue to work with the BLM to develop criteria and designate specific zones appropriate for development. NRDC has also created an online GIS mapping tool that clearly identifies restricted areas and highlights sensitive land that should be off-limits.

In the midst of her job’s new challenges and complexities, Wald’s love of western landscapes sustains her. She recalls a moment in Idaho’s Teton Valley when she spotted a moose standing in a river, its antlers strung with vegetation and dripping with water. “I can still close my eyes and see that place today,” she says. Her job is to make sure others will have the chance to witness similar wonders.

left: courtesy of nrdc; right: Molly surno

“Everything I had been working for was at risk from one of those things: climate change or this relatively new threat, poorly sited energy projects”

NRDC Board of Trustees

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

Arjun Gupta Founder and Managing Partner, Telesoft Partners

Daniel R. Tishman Chair; Vice Chairman, AECOM Technology Corp.; Chair and CEO, Tishman Construction Corp. of New York

Richard E. Ayres The Ayres Law Group

Van Jones Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress; Senior Policy Advisor, Green for All

Frederick A.O. Schwarz, Jr. Chair Emeritus; Chief Counsel, Brennan Center for Justice; Senior Counsel, Cravath, Swaine & Moore, L.L.P.

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

Adam Albright Vice Chair; private investor; environmentalist

Leonardo DiCaprio Actor; environmentalist

Patricia Bauman Vice Chair; Co-director, Bauman Foundation

theo’s vision

Robert J. Fisher Vice Chair; Director, Gap, Inc.

Theo Westenberger became

Alan Horn Vice Chair; President and COO, Warner Bros.

a successful commercial photographer at a time when women in the field were scarce.

She was the first female to shoot the covers of Newsweek and Sports Illustrated and became a staff photographer for Life magazine in 1982. But it was her work for National Geographic that inspired her lifelong concern about the encroachment of civilization on wild places and wild creatures.

Working in Africa convinced her that learning from and protecting animals were central to an understanding of humanity—a “moral imperative,” as she put it. “Theo believed in NRDC and admired its success at protecting wild animals and their habitat,” says Colleen Keegan, a close friend. Westenberger, who died in 2008, “would be pleased to know that NRDC has created a fund in her memory.”

The Theo Westenberger Fund for Animal and Habitat Protection, established through her estate, will help NRDC defend the earth for generations to come. In addition to her artistic legacy, she has left a legacy of hope for our environment. See Theo’s photography at www. theowestenberger.com.

For information on how to leave your own lasting legacy, contact Michelle Mulia-Howell, director of gift planning, at legacygifts@nrdc.org or 212-727-4421.

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) Henry R. Breck Partner, Heronetta Management,L.P.

Anna Scott Carter Consultant, NRDC; environmentalist

Laurie P. David Producer; activist

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

Philip B. Korsant Managing Member, Korsant Partners, L.L.C. Nicole Lederer Co-founder, Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2) Michael Lynton Chairman and CEO, Sony Pictures Entertainment Shelly B. Malkin Landscape painter; conservationist Josephine A. Merck Artist; Founder, Ocean View Foundation Mary Moran NRDC Global Leadership Council Member

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

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

Joan K. Davidson Former Parks Commissioner, N.Y. State; President Emerita, The J.M. Kaplan Fund

Ruben Kraiem Partner, Covington and Burling, L.L.P.

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

Wendy K. Neu Senior Vice President, Hugo Neu Corp.; grassroots community organizer and activist Frederica Perera, Ph.D. Professor, Columbia University; Director, Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health Robert Redford Actor; director; conservationist Laurance Rockefeller Conservationist Jonathan F. P. Rose President, Jonathan Rose Companies, L.L.C. Thomas W. Roush, M.D. Private investor; environmental activist Philip T. Ruegger, III Chairman, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, L.L.P; Chairman of the Board of Henry Street Settlement House Christine H. Russell, Ph.D. Environmentalist; foundation director

William H. Schlesinger President, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies Wendy Kirby Schmidt President, The Schmidt Family Foundation; Founder, The 11th Hour Project James Gustave Speth Professor of Law, Vermont Law School; Distinguished Senior Fellow, Demos Max Stone Managing Director, D.E. Shaw & Co., L.P. 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

Nathaniel P. Reed Businessman; conservationist

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

Burks B. Lapham Chair, Concern, Inc.

Cruz Reynoso Professor of law, UC Davis

Thomas A. Troyer Member, Caplin & Drysdale

Maya Lin Artist/designer

John R. Robinson Attorney

Michael A. McIntosh, Sr. President, The McIntosh Foundation

John Sheehan United Steelworkers of America (retired)

Kirby Walker Independent film/ video producer

Daniel Pauly Director, Fisheries Centre, University of British Columbia

David Sive Sive, Paget & Riesel, P.C. (retired)

NRDC Staff president Frances Beinecke eXECUTIVE Director Peter H. Lehner PROGRAM STAFF: Wesley Warren, director; Action Fund: Heather TaylorMiesle, director; Matthew Howes, Corry McKee; Air & Energy: Dale Bryk, director; Ann Alexander, Christina Angelides, Evelyn Arevalo, Mona Avalos, Jamy Bacchus, Max Baumhefner, Kaid Benfield, Drew Bennett, Terry Black, Uchenna Bright, Pierre Bull, Ralph Cavanagh, Allison Clements, Brandi Colander, Lisa Copland, Donna DeCostanzo, Pierre Delforge, Natisha Demko, Amanda Eaken, Kristin Eberhard, Lara Ettenson, Deborah Faulkner, Shannon Fisk, Rishi Garg, David Goldstein, Vignesh Gowrishankar, Nathanael Greene, Ashok Gupta, Justin Horner, Noah Horowitz, Roland Hwang, Alexander Jackson, Richard Kassel, Valerie Keane, Kit Kennedy, Elizabeth Landeros, Noah Long, Daniel Lorch, Deron Lovaas, Luis Martinez, Sierra Martinez, Peter Miller, Simon Mui, Colin Peppard, James Presswood, Marissa Ramirez, Robin Roy, Laura E. Sanchez, Thomas Singer, Brian Siu, Rebecca Stanfield, Luke Tonachel, John Walke, Sharianne Walker, Margaret Waltner, Devra Wang, Sheryl Warzecha, Samantha Wilt; Center for Market Innovation: Peter Malik, director; Judith Albert, Christine Chang, Diane Doucette, Greg Hale, Thomas Hayes, Philip Henderson, Jennifer Henry, Radhika Khosla, Kevin Levy, Yerina Mugica, Carlin Rosengarten, Douglass Sims, Cai Steger, Samir Succar, Alisa Valderrama, Starla Yeh; China: Barbara Finamore, director; Hoober Hu, Ruidong Jin, Hyoung Mi Kim, Yang Li, Yuqi Li, Alvin Lin, Zixin Lin, Mingming Liu, Runhui Liu, Jingjing Qian, Junxia Su, Jun Tian, Alex Wang, Yaling Wang, Qi Wu, Christine Xu, Xiaoli Yan, Mona Yew, Anne Zhang, Xiya Zhang, Yao Zheng; Climate Center: Daniel Lashof, director; Radha Adhar, Peter Altman, Jamie Consuegra, David Doniger, Kelly Henderson, Meleah Geertsma, David Hawkins, Antonia Herzog, Laurie Johnson, Franz Matzner, George Peridas, Theo Spencer, John Steelman, Lucy Swiech-LaFlamme; Government Affairs: David Goldston, director; Richie Ackerman, Marc Boom, Lisa Catapano, Kellie Cutrer, Apolinar Gonzales, Andrea Martin, Ann Notthoff, Ellis Pepper, Robert Perks, Lindsey Reed, Victoria Rome, Scott Slesinger, Melissa Waage, Lauren Zingarelli; Health: Linda Greer, director; Diane Bailey, Dana Gunders, Sarah Janssen, Jonathan Kaplan, Avinash Kar, Susan Keane, Kim Knowlton, David Lennett, Daniel Rosenberg, Miriam Rotkin-Ellman, Jennifer Sass, Gina Solomon, Suzanne Vyborney, Monique Waples, Mae Wu; International: Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, director; Carlota Arias, Elizabeth Barratt-Brown, Carolina Herrera, Anjali Jaiswal, Amanda Maxwell, Shravya Reddy, Jacob Scherr, Jake Schmidt, Elizabeth Shope; Land: Sharon Buccino, director; Janet Barwick, Charles Clusen, Sylvia Fallon, Debbie Hammel, Nathaniel Lawrence, Amy Mall, Bobby McEnaney, Helen O’Shea, Rebecca Riley, Justin Sherman, Matthew Skoglund, Mary Umekubo, Johanna Wald, Andrew Wetzler, Louisa Willcox, Craig Dylan Wyatt, Sami Yassa, Carl Zichella; Litigation: Mitch Bernard, director; Irina Petrova, corporate counsel; Joshua Berman, Lisa Busch, Aaron Colangelo, Robert F. Kennedy, Selena Kyle, Ben Longstreth, Nancy Marks, Catherine Rahm, Andres Restrepo, Lucia Roibal, Aaron Schaer, Joya Sonnenfeldt, Jennifer Sorenson, Michael Wall, Vivian Wang; Midwest Regional: Henry L. Henderson, director; Amrita Batra, Thomas Cmar, Jennifer Daly, Melissa Lupo, Nicholas Magrisso, Dylan Sullivan; Nuclear: Christopher Paine, director; Thomas B. Cochran, Geoffrey Fettus, Matt McKinzie, Jonathan McLaugh-

lin, Robert S. Norris; Oceans: Sarah Chasis, director; Jonathan Alexander, Seth Atkinson, Alison Chase, Karen Garrison, Marisa Kaminski, Lawrence Levine, Leila Monroe, Regan Nelson, David Newman, Bradford Sewell, Lisa Speer, Lisa Suatoni, Marina Zaiats; Science Center: Christina Swanson, director; Briana Mordick; Urban East: Mark Izeman, director; Johanna Dyer, Jessica Esposito, Eric Goldstein, Allen Hershkowitz, Darby Hoover, Albert Huang, Richard Schrader, Kate Sinding, Elinor Tarlow; Urban West: Joel Reynolds, director; Gregory Gould, Lizzeth Henao, Michael Jasny, Taryn Kiekow, Melissa Lin Perrella, Adriano Martinez, Damon Nagami, David Pettit, Lindsi Seegmiller, Gopi Shah, Zak Smith, Jessica Wall, Morgan Wyenn; Water: David Beckman, director; Ben Chou, Jon Devine, Steven Fleischli, Noah Garrison, Andy Gupta, Rebecca Hammer, Karen Hobbs, Carol James, Michelle Mehta, Barry Nelson, Douglas Obegi, Edward Osann, Katherine Poole, Tracy Quinn, Monty Schmitt; COMMUNICATIONS: Phil Gutis, director; Cathryn Bales, Ynés Cabral, Edwin Chen, Anthony Clark, Robert Deans, Linda Escalante, Rachel Fried, Alba Garzon, Lisa Goffredi, Sherry Goldberg, Courtney Hamilton, Elizabeth Heyd, Daniel Hinerfeld, Serena Ingre, Valerie Jaffee, Robert Keefe, Francesca Koe, Jessica Lass, Kathryn McGrath, Joshua Mogerman, Jennifer Powers, Adrianna Quintero-Somaini, Kimberly Ranney, Carlita Salazar, Auden Shim, Katherine Slusark, Suzanne Struglinski, William Tam, Lisa Whiteman; onearth Douglas S. Barasch, editor-in-chief; George Black, Scott Dodd, Janet Gold, Jocelyn C. Zuckerman; DEVELOPMENT: John Murray, director; Gina A. Abramo, Coretta Anderson, Jean Bowman, Spencer Campbell, John Cavanagh, Jennifer Chapin, Elizabeth Corr, Justin Courter, Maria DeRiggi, Caitlin Driscoll, Sarah Edwards-Schmidt, Travis Eisenbise, Robert Ferguson, Katherine Gibson, Nancy Golden, Shari Greenblatt, Courtney Gross, Ashley Honeysett, Rita Itwaru, Patrick Kiely, Ying Li, Kelly McGonigle, Elizabeth McNulty, Nancy Metzger, Peter Meysenburg, Emily Moyer, Michelle Mulia-Howell, Emily O’Neill, Shaniqua Outlaw, Matthew Perrin, Caroline Pronovost, Michelle Quinones, Lynne Shevlin, Shannon Slanker, Missy Toney, Tammy Tran, Julie Truax, Steve Van Landingham, Denise Vazquez, Catherine Vega, Nicole Verhoff, Desrene Walton, Marian Weber, Marianna Weis; Membership: Linda Lopez, director; Darlene Davis, Lillian Fernandez, Amy Greer, Alex Hernandez, Katharine Houston, Jordan Kessler, Jennifer Lam, Gina Trujillo, Marie Weinmann, Joyce Yeung; FINANCE AND OPERATIONS: Judith Keefer, director; Finance: Hiawatha Barno, Annette Canela, Dorothy Clune, Jeff Cruz, Debby Fuentes, James Hands, Sharon Hargrove, Lauretta Hoffler, Eunice Jean-Paul, Alex Liu, ShihChang Lu, Apurva Muchhala, Vivek Nadarajah; Administration: Jackie Albarran, Sasha Alleyne, Sonah Allie, Umar Al-Uqdah, Brian Anderson, Sarah Brailey, Larisa Bravette, Anita Brennan, Willa Bugnon, Angela Calderon, William Christie, Tianya Coachman, Matthew Cohen, Genie Colbert, Lasans Crawford, Angeliki Ebbesen, Leslie Edmond, Matthew Eisenson, Mimose Elie, Mercedes Falber, Sevi Glekas, Brian Gourley, Molly Greenwood, Anthony Guerrero, Sung Hwang, Brian James, Rodrigo Jaramillo, Leslie Jones, Vera Korol, Rene Leni, Shelly Lyser, Felicia Marcus, Marisa McFarlane, Malia Palakiko, Leonard Patterson, Penny Primo, Ann Roach, Roseann Rock, Stephanie Sandor, Abby Schaefer, Robyn Spencer, Milagro Suarez, Vivek Varughese, Bradley Wells.

S u mm e r 2 0 1 1

onearth 6 3

open space After we’re gone

ot long ago, I was asked to stand world as supreme, but to do it we have to exterminate ourselves.

I think the sublime also accounts for the current vogue for ruins, before a camera at Niagara Falls and speculate about what might happen there if humans suddenly especially the decaying industrial wreckage of the Rust Belt. The vanished from the earth. The occasion was the His- inevitable hand-wringing about “ruin porn” misses the point: ruins tory Channel show called Life After People, which are an age-old route to the sublime. “Everything dissolves, everything uses spectacular computer graphics to show how perishes, everything passes, only time goes on,” wrote Diderot.

But if the ruin is a memento mori, how is it changed when it evokes the world would go to pieces—awesomely—if we up and disappeared. I hadn’t seen the show, but when the producer called I got the point at once. the fleetingness of not just one human life or empire but the whole human race? Is this the greatest imag“Oh, yeah, the post-human sublime,” inable humility in the face of the implaI told him. “That meme is everywhere.” cable march of time? Or is it an easy I didn’t know the half of it. Life After out for a species unwilling to face up People, I was told, is one of the most to its own ruinous reach? This is what popular shows on the History Channel, bugged me about the post-human along with Ice Road Truckers and Modmeme. It seemed to yield a kind of ern Marvels. Our roads and bridges and hopelessness I associate with extremdams fascinate us, whether serving ists—Earth First! and biblical literalour needs or succumbing to ruin. The ists—who preach that the world will producer directed me to online clips, one day be cleansed of mere mankind. and I spent an afternoon gripped by For both, the extirpation of earthly hufootage of buildings caving in, bridges manity is a consummation devoutly to falling down, highways eroding to dust. be wished. Neither worldview gives us Some episodes showed our pernicious much reason to improve our special influence outlasting us: landfills leakconnection to this planet. We are, after ing toxic goo, untended nuclear reacall, only passing through. tors irradiating wildlife. But mostly the Considered in that light, the “life program implied that eventually, in a after people” fantasy seemed despairworld without people, the earth would inducing, an excuse for turning away regain its balance. just as we should be focusing in. But I I wasn’t sure I could get on board. was overthinking things.

Yes, the post-human world is popular.

“Are there any well-known monuAlan Weisman’s The World Without If the ruin is a memento mori, how ments above Niagara that could get Us was a best-seller; Alexis Rockman’s is it changed when it evokes the fleetswept over the Falls?” one of the post-apocalyptic cityscapes are hit ingness of not just one human life or show’s writers called to ask. And paintings. And people flock to film’s empire but the whole human race? then I saw it: fun was the factor I had post-human landscapes, from the forgotten. Imagining the monster in drowned Statue of Liberty in Artificial Intelligence to the blasted highways of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. the closet makes us appreciate the cozy bed.

I did the show. Big freighters crashed over the brink, power plants There’s a word for all this: sublime. The artistic term describes the awe we feel for things larger than ourselves. In the past, the natural collapsed, and the Falls eroded into a series of piddling rapids. I stood world was sublime: mountains, waterfalls, the ocean, and the stars in a light rain, trying to sound as if I knew something about geology. gave people a sense of insignificance in relation to the vasty universe. The show—though it scared my nephews—was not despairing. Look But we have lost the faculty to be so diminished. We move mountains at the world, it urged us. Human things are not all that matters. Grass and harness rivers. We have unleashed the power of the atom, unrav- matters. Falling water matters. They would matter if we were gone. In eled the secrets of our genome, and unbalanced the planet’s climate. forcing us to imagine our own absence, it was calling out for presence, What on this puny rock could be bigger than we are? Yet our seeming goading us to take up once more a right relationship to a world that omnipotence does not satisfy us. We still yearn to see the natural must remain, for the foreseeable future, saddled with us.

6 4 onearth

Summer 2011

illustration by scott bakal

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