SAVING THE WONDERS OF THE SEA OF CORTEZ p.28
A Survival Guide for the Planet • published by the natural resources defense council
Can the Cruise Industry Clean Up Its Act? This billion-dollar Royal Caribbean ship boasts a state-of-the-art wastewater treatment plant and 21,000 square feet of solar panels. It also burns up to 7,200 gallons per hour of the world’s dirtiest fuel.
summer 2012 w w w.one arth.org
PLUS
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THE NATURE OF BREASTS WHAT A BLIND SCIENTIST CAN SEE WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT, ALGAE?
contents
Onearth magazine
volume 34 number 2 summer 2012
FEATU R ES
28 Sea of Wonders by Tim Folger
d epa r tm ents cover story
42
Jacques Cousteau once famously described Mexico’s Sea of Cortez as “the world’s aquarium.” Now that it’s near collapse, what can one small fishing village do to save it?
Algae-based biofuel makes for a slippery political football. Plus, under one vintner’s careful stewardship, an ailing winery recovers.
Q&A The lead-up to the passage of the Farm Bill every five years marks a period of struggle between family farmers and Big Ag. John Hansen is a grizzled veteran.
36 In Each Shell A Story
24 the synthesist
by Susan Freinkel
From the “arms race” among ancient mollusks to presentday ocean acidification, a blind scientist vividly interprets the world through his fingertips.
by Alan Burdick What if the future of the car wasn’t just about longer-lived batteries? Could electrified roads be the key?
26 living green
46 How Cool Is That?
by Rob Walker One man imagines a consumer world where the hot “brand” is made up of already-owned items.
by David Biello
Every Google search or Amazon purchase consumes power. Now Norwegian engineers hope to build the world’s biggest, most energy-efficient data center— hundreds of feet underground.
The residents of Falmouth, Jamaica, hoped that cruise ships like the Allure of the Seas would usher in a new era of prosperity. So far the reality hasn’t quite lived up to the dream.
po etr y
14 Flow by Ben Howard
by Michael Behar
by William Heyen
and raw sewage into the oceans without a second
visit onearth.org
jeffery salter
Dreamboat
56 Cage
onearth online Read the digital edition of the magazine on your computer, e-reader, or tablet device, and access complete back issues at onearth.org/digital
8 From the Editor 14 Letters 17 FRONTLINES
In the bad old days, cruise ships used to dump garbage thought. Royal Caribbean, the world’s second-largest
54 reviews
Facing enemies from cancer to premature puberty, can an evolutionary miracle—our breasts— stay the way that Nature intended?
64 open space
by Le Anne Schreiber There’s a time to throw away the field guides and learn instead from the evidence of your own senses.
insi de n r dc
10 view from nrdc
cruise ship operator, wants its new mega-liners to show
by Frances Beinecke
that the industry has cleaned up its act—but first they
12 the deans list
will have to stop burning the world’s dirtiest fossil fuel.
by Bob Deans
58 dispatches Cover: Photographed for OnEarth by Tia Magallon.
Public health and coal-fired power, “facts” from Big Oil, and more.
s pr i n g 2 0 1 2
onearth 1
Visit Costa Rica, a bird-rich neotropical region. Home to 893 bird species. Here is the astonishing Chestnutmandibled Toucan.
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volume 34
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summer 2012
Find links to everything on this page at onearth.org/web
4connect w ith u s Get our newsletter onearth.org/newsletter On Facebook onearth.org/facebook On Twitter twitter.com/onearthmag On Tumblr onearth.tumblr.com
4W E B
CRUDE SECRETS John Bolenbaugh says his shoreline cleanup crew was ordered to cover up oil on Michigan’s Kalamazoo River.
E X C LU S I V E S
The Whistleblower
Editor-at-large TED GENOWAYS tells the story of a Michigan man with a dark past who claims he was fired for threatening to expose the shoddy, deceptive practices of a pipeline company and its contractors in the wake of the worst inland oil spill in U.S. history. OnEarth’s special three-part investigation of the July 2010 disaster is also available as a free e-book. onearth.org/whistleblower
4most p op ul ar
Ridiculously Cute Wildlife
Our new weekly series spotlights the most irresistible creatures in the world, starting with an adorable baby hippo that will make you squee. You’re welcome, America! onearth.org/ecocuties
ABOVE left: Mary Anne Andrei; above right: Poon Watchara-Amphaiwan; RIGHT: chipotle
Best Apocalypse Ever!
The popular Hunger Games pictures a future starved of resources. Which got us thinking: what’s the scariest environmental dystopia ever put on film? And, uh, how realistic is it? onearth.org/apocalypse
4F E A T U R E D
BLOGS
Starbucks’s Quest for a Better Cup Gut Check: Growing Evidence That Chemicals Can Make Us Fat An Elephant’s DNA Never Forgets Rush Limbaugh Attacks Food Book ‘Authorette’ Superbug Suit: Judge Orders FDA to Act on Antibiotic Use in Livestock
More online-only stories: onearth.org/webexclusives
4meet t he wri ter Her debut in the New York Times Magazine this spring asked whether silence itself has vanished. On our website, KIM TINGLEY explores other disappearances in her series SPECIES WATCH, which spotlights exotic, threatened creatures from around the globe. Meet a seagrass that’s been cloning itself since the last Ice Age, insects whose mating call rivals a lawnmower engine, and a missing link whose digestive system is on the outside. Nature, man. onearth.org/specieswatch
onearth.org/blog
TODAY ONEARTH
BEHIND THE BURRITO
LOVE HURTS
Every weekday, our editors pick the environmental stories you shouldn’t miss, delivered with attitude and a pungent point of view. onearth.org/todayonearth
You’ve probably seen the great Chipotle commercial that disses factory farming. Our columnist takes a closer look at the feel–good branding. onearth.org/12sum/chipotle
Hey, all you addicted Frozen Planet peeps: relive the epic Discovery TV series and its Gossip Girl–like tales of lust and violence with our recaps. onearth.org/frozenplanet
summer 2012
onearth 5
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contributors Rob WalkeR (“This Brand Is Your Brand,” p. 26) is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine. He is the author of Buying In: The Secret Dialogue Between What We Buy and Who We Are (Random House) and co-editor of the forthcoming Significant Objects: 100 Extraordinary Stories About Ordinary Things (Fantagraphics).
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marcus bleasdale (“How Cool Is That?,” p. 50) is an Oslobased documentary photographer whose work on human rights and conflict has garnered numerous awards, including UNICEF Photographer of the Year. Featured in publications such as the New Yorker and Le Monde, his work has also been used by the United Nations in making policy decisions.
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susan Freinkel (“In Each Shell a Story,” p. 36) is the author of Plastic: A Toxic Love Story (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). Her previous book, American Chestnut: The Life, Death, and Rebirth of a Perfect Tree (University of California Press), won a 2008 National Outdoor Book Award. She also writes for magazines including Health and Discover.
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editor’s letter It did, actually, take a village
T
wo events in recent months really stand out for me. The first was
driving home from New York City in a snowstorm—on October 29. The second was watching the magnolia tree in our front yard bloom—in late March, about one month ahead of schedule. Two days later, seasonally normal temperatures returned, and an evening freeze killed off the blossoms, turning them from a delicate pale purple to a sickly burnt orange. The magnolia survived, and I’ve been reassured that it will blossom anew next spring, a note of hope to which I will return momentarily. Others across the country have experienced similar weather aberrations. A new poll even finds that a large majority of Americans—finally—attribute extreme or unusual weather to climate change. Alas, this is a bit like realizing that cigarettes are hazardous to your After merely a decade, the fish returned. health after learning you have lung cancer. The sea repaired itself. And ecotourism Despite the many discouraging trends—tumbling ice shelves, vanishing burgeoned, bringing the village a new, species, swirling gyres of ocean plastic, more promising livelihood. massive clear-cutting of primeval forests, the conversion of Canadian wilderness into industrial moonscapes in pursuit of tar sands oil—those of us working in and around the environmental profession manage to get up in the morning because encouraging signs do, somehow, still emerge on the horizon. Take Mexico’s resplendent Sea of Cortez, home to blue whales, rainbow wrasses, and yellowfin surgeonfish. “Nearly a thousand species of fish dwell here, and at least 5,000 invertebrate species—no one knows the true number,” writes OnEarth contributing editor TIM FOLGER. And yet overfishing has plunged the sea into a precipitous decline—at first blush, just another bad news story. “The wild shrimp fishery in the northern Sea of Cortez has virtually collapsed,” writes Folger. “In the last several decades, five species of sea turtle have all but disappeared from these waters.” But here’s some good news: scientists have hypothesized that if one could protect a circumscribed marine habitat from overfishing, it would eventually recover. That theory was put to the test when a local community historically dependent on fishing enforced an ambitious “no-take zone” on a 27-square-mile portion of the sea, just off the coast of their little village, Cabo Pulmo. After merely a decade, the fish returned abundantly. The sea repaired itself. Moreover, a thriving ecotourist industry burgeoned, bringing the village a new, more promising livelihood than even fishing had offered. A happy ending? The patient is cured? Not quite. Aggressive resort developers have proposed a megaproject nearby. And the Mexican government has not demonstrated either sufficient commitment or sufficient capacity to safeguard officially designated marine protected areas, including Cabo Pulmo. So stay tuned. Yet look at what can be done. We are not helpless; no place is doomed. Which may give us all reason to get up in the morning and greet, dare I say, a new dawn.
8 onearth
summer 2012
Poon Watchara-Amphaiwan
a
Do u gl a s S . b a r a s c h
view from NRDC
T
the rio+20 summit: only real action matters his June, tens of thousands of the world’s citizens will join global
francEs beinecke, President
1 0 onearth
spring 2012
Matt Greenslade/photo-nyc.com
leaders for Rio+20, the United Nations’ Earth Summit. If recent international gatherings are any guide, many of the participants will engage in lengthy discussions and make scores of proposals. But NRDC wants this summit to be different. We want to see Rio+20 focus on real commitments to reach a sustainable future, not just promises—concrete actions instead of vague agreements. Around the globe, people are developing effective ways to provide safe drinking water, reduce carbon pollution, restore fisheries, and make cities healthier places “You’re letting politicians off easy,” to live. The Earth Summit can help bring Mayor Bloomberg told me. “They don’t those real-world solutions to more communities, but only if leaders commit to mind signing a commitment for 2050 enacting them—starting now. When I because none of them will be around.” attended the U.N. climate negotiations in Bali five years ago, Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York told me, “You are letting politicians off easy. They don’t mind signing a commitment for 2050 because none of them will be around in 40 years.” He’s right. So NRDC is urging leaders to leave Rio not with a lofty treaty but with commitments to reach specific goals within the next few years. We have launched SummitWatch.org, an online registry of the actions presidents and prime ministers have agreed to; citizens can use the registry to track whether their leaders are turning those words into deeds. We want action and accountability to trump pledges and promises. I believe this change is possible, because I saw how the first Earth Summit generated transformation 20 years ago. It focused world attention on sustainable development and prompted more than 100 nations to create their own plans for promoting economic growth in ways that preserve natural resources and advance social equity. That was unthinkable before. Today many nations, cities, and corporations have environmental sustainability programs. We need a new generation of environmental leaders who are focused on action and who are not only younger but also more diverse. Some of the most vibrant efforts to clean up the air and water are emerging at the local level, so we are encouraging mayors and governors to join heads of state in Rio to commit to specific solutions. We will use social media and campus outreach to engage young people as well, because the results of Rio+20 will be their future. Pundits often gauge the success of these meetings on the basis of how many nations sign new treaties. But the best outcome would be a robust competition, not a grand negotiation: a cultural shift in which nations, cities, and corporations vie to see who removes the most diesel pollution or generates the most solar power in the next several years. The planet doesn’t need more pledges. It needs more action.
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the deans list
by bob deans
the right wing vs. the pentagon technologies is not the Navy’s responsibility.” Others have challenged the Navy’s goal of getting half of bill that tops $19.4 billion, the Defense Department is the largest all its energy from non-fossil-fuel sources by 2020. “Now look, oil and electricity consumer in the I love green energy, so I’m not against it. It’s a matter of priorities,” Representative Randy Forbes, Republican of Virginia, United States. Delivering fuel to the battle- told Mabus during a House Armed Services Committee field puts lives at risk. And most hearing on February 16. “You’re not the secretary of energy. Americans don’t much like the You’re the secretary of the Navy.” Countered Mabus: “These idea of pumping U.S. dollars into efforts have already made us better war fighters.” Warships, the treasuries of oil-producing na- aircraft, and fighting forces depend heavily on oil; reducing tions whose leaders don’t share our interests. So the mili- that dependence can help make the force more flexible and tary is waging a multi-front campaign to increase energy enable it to move more efficiently, he said. Congressional skeptics are pushing the military for efficiency, replace petroleum with alternative fuels (to the extent possible), and develop wind, solar, and other budget specifics. The Pentagon, for instance, is asking for $1.1 billion next year to cut energy consumption in renewable power sources. The effort is trimming the cost of advanced air combat the more than 300,000 military buildings that consume $4 billion worth of entraining at Nevada’s ergy each year. The Nellis Air Force Base, Air Force wants $530 which gets a quarter of Unfortunately, the debate over our million to pay for such its electricity from 140 military’s energy future is playing out steps as upgrading jet acres of solar panels. It on a political stage tainted by partisan engines to cut waris lightening the load criticism of clean energy plane fuel use by up for marines in Afghanito 30 percent. Such stan, who are getting initiatives could yield power from the sun to replace some of the 16 pounds of batteries these warriors substantial savings for taxpayers. Unfortunately, the debate normally haul to juice up the growing array of electronics over our military’s energy future is playing out on a political they take to the fight. And these innovations are saving stage tainted by partisan criticism of clean energy. “It is very millions of gallons of fuel that otherwise would be trucked apparent—very apparent—that there is an anti-fossil-fuel to combat zones, where convoys are often targeted by road- attitude [within] the Department of Defense,” freshman side bombs. These explosive devices have been among the Representative Austin Scott, Republican of Georgia, alleged deadliest threats faced by U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. during a hearing before the readiness subcommittee of the But as budget constraints cause House Armed Services Committee. visit onearth.org Yes, because the Pentagon believes it is in our national infierce jockeying for defense dollars, to read Bob Deans’s weekly guide to environmental politics in Washington. the ambitious nature of the Penta- terest to reduce our reliance on foreign oil. “This is not part of onearth.org/thedeanslist gon’s advanced energy initiatives an environmental or green agenda,” Jackalyne Pfannenstiel, is drawing fire from some of the GOP’s most stalwart the Navy’s assistant secretary for energy, installations, and military advocates. “The administration is proposing a environment, told the House readiness panel. The purpose, reduced defense budget at a time when the challenges she said, “is to maintain America’s military leadership.” to our security are arguably more daunting than at any time in recent memory,” John McCain, the ranking Bob Deans, NRDC’s associate director of communications, is a Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, veteran newspaper reporter and a former president of the White told Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus during a hearing House Correspondents’ Association. His most recent book is Reckless: on March 15. “Using defense dollars to subsidize new energy The Political Assault on the American Environment.
1 2 onearth
summer 2012
illustration by bruce morser
With an annual energy
Since Tea Party extremists swept into Congress in 2010, the House has voted more than 200 times to undermine environmental safeguards. Read the book that tells the story of this misguided attempt to unravel our environmental safety net.
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“We must work, all of us, to help restore the bipartisan majority for our environment and to mend that torn yet still vital place in the soul of American politics.” —From the Foreword by Robert Redford
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lIFE aT THE BOTTOM OF THE FOOd CHaIn p.54
a sURVIVal gUIdE FOR THE PlanET • published by the natural resources defense council
POsEIdOn lOsT
The End of a Myth
WE THOUGHT THE SEA WAS INFINITE AND INEXHAUSTIBLE. IT IS NOT. JULIA WHITTY CALLS FOR A NEW VISION TO SAVE OUR OCEANS.
40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011
preneurs to address its shortcomings. By very adroitly providing the social backdrop, Black added depth and understanding to the rest of his story. —xenophile posted online at OnEarth.org
PLUS IndIa CallIng: THE gREEn CEll PHOnE REVOlUTIOn spring 2012 w w w.one arth.org
BladEs & FEaTHERs: WInd TURBInEs THaT dOn’T KIll THE OTHER aMERICa: THIRsT In THE land OF PlEnTy
below the surface “The End of a Myth,” by Julia Whitty (Spring 2012) is a compelling wake-up call for preserving the health of our oceans and the creatures that live in them. Let’s hope that enough people and countries will take action to correct the degradation of this critically important part of our planet before the decline becomes irreversible. —DAVE OWENS Frisco, Colorado As I read the final passage of “The End of a Myth” (“...the invisible shoal ahead, the shipwreck onto a world without ocean”], I felt like finding the nearest bridge to jump from. OnEarth has to take to heart the maxim of the great poet Goethe that “if opinions are expressed to me, they must be expressed positively. Of negative things I have enough in myself.” —andrew hartman Wappingers Falls, New York
signal strength George Black’s “India Calling” (Spring 2012) was interesting not only for its stated subject—the implications of the cell phone revolution—but for the well-drawn snapshots of Indian rural life and the efforts of scientists and entre-
1 4 onearth
summer 2 0 1 2
Thanks to “India Calling” for enlightening me on the rapid development of my state, Uttar Pradesh, where I spent eight years working for grassroots nonprofits. —pallavi posted online at OnEarth.org
light on your feet Working in the outdoor industry, I wish there had been more on footwear in “Traveling Too Light?” by Robert Moor (Spring 2012). I see firsthand an industry dominated by shoes based on an ethylene vinyl acetate (EVA) platform, which has a very toxic footprint in most cases during production and a very short lifetime. Polyurethane (PU) is a much more durable and cleaner choice. —chad gallwitz posted online at OnEarth.org
flying off course Your infographic “In-Flight Safety Information” (Spring 2012) was super, but it did ignore one other drawback to wind turbines: avoidance. For example, turbines in the Great Lakes may force wintering waterfowl species away from the shoals that are their prime feeding areas. On land, wintering tundra bird species appear to avoid turbine fields, as do migrating shorebirds, forcing them to use less productive fields for foraging and possibly affecting their fat reserves and their breeding fitness. —bob fisher posted online at OnEarth.org
onearth@nrdc.org
coming out in hives
some like it hot
As a beekeeper, I take exception to a couple of points in “The Latest Buzz on Bees,” by Eric Scigliano (Spring 2012). First, there is no way to come upon a hive and determine that the bees are nosema-free. Second, there is no such thing as a queen that ejects brood. Once she’s laid an egg, she never gives a second thought to the developing larvae. —anonymous user
Reading “Bird on Fire,” by Emma Marris (Spring 2012), you’d think the people of Phoenix would look out into their desert and notice the ruins of another civilization that was unable to cope with climate change: the Anasazi. Will people still want to move to Phoenix when the climate is more like that of Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, with summertime highs of 120 degrees? “But it’s a dry heat...” —G3E posted online at OnEarth.org
posted online at OnEarth.org The editors respond: To clarify, it was not beekeeper Dan Harvey who determined that the bees he observed were nosema-free, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture, where he sent them for analysis. On the second point, yes, we were wrong: it is worker bees, not the queen, that expel the infested brood.
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.
Flow Intelligence, it seems, is neither warder nor wise protector when it comes to houses. Listen, if you can, to water seeping into your old foundation. Where it goes your earnings go, as does your peace of mind. Listen to water dripping from your eaves and hope that every downspout, every gutter is as it should be, water knowing how to find its way, even through block and mortar. And if it is your habit to solicit divine assistance, pray for competence in all the crafts pertaining to construction, lest the element your body’s made of, the one that can undo you by its absence, should prove to be your enemy, intent in turning all your hours and your labor to sand and mud, and all your good intentions into a lesson that you duly learned but somehow in maturity forgot, its best reminder seeping from a crack that might be patched, though what persists behind it will ever be at odds with your containment. —B en H owa r d
illustration by blair thornley
backtalk
“We can’t manage our way to a sustainable future. You must lead the way.” Eban Goodstein, Director
Bard Graduate Programs in Sustainability LEAD THE CHANGE MS in environmental policy MS in climate science and policy MBA in sustainability Bard Graduate Programs in Sustainability New York City | Hudson Valley www.bard.edu/gps tel 845.758.7071
Bard
center for environmental policy
Calling All Students! C2C Fellows is a national network for undergraduates and recent graduates aspiring to sustainability leadership in politics and business. Offering $1000 scholarships for campus leaders! | Young people with the wisdom, talent, and grace to remake the world | Workshops led by Director Goodstein and his team at locations around the country | Bard College, University of Tennessee, UC Boulder, and more!
www.bard.edu/cep/c2c e-mail climate@bard.edu
Summer 2012
illustration by Martin O’Neill; STATISTICS: food and agriculture organization of the united nations (1,2), university of minnesota center for biorefining (3)
s c i e n c e b u s i n e s s n a t u r e t e c h n o l o g y c u l t u r e p o l i t i c s
into the wild green yonder
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by jeff turrentine
Algae-derived biofuel—already powering some planes and helicopters—offers a cleaner, renewable alternative to petroleum. Will its partisan critics give it a chance to fly?
This technology isn’t in the blue-sky or even beta-testing stage ast November 7, Continental Airlines of the R&D sequence. It has already been proved in the lab, and Flight 1403 took off from Houston, bound for it’s now being proved in the marketplace, where some very big Chicago. The trip was utterly unremarkable clients—among them major airlines, the U.S. Navy, and Bunge, one of save for one thing. Thanks to its fuel—a blend the world’s largest agribusiness conglomerates—are placing orders of standard jet diesel and a biofuel derived from for millions of gallons of algae-derived biofuel from algae—the flight reduced carbon visit onearth.org dozens of manufacturers. dioxide emissions by an amount to see a video explaining how algae can be made into fuel. onearth.org/ But that fact wasn’t enough to stop a fusillade of cyniequivalent to what a car would 12sum/algaevideo cal rejoinders. The day after the president’s speech, spew out in 30,000 miles of driving. Rush Limbaugh couldn’t seem to stop using the phrase “pond scum” In a February speech, President Obama gave a shout-out to the in his attempt to portray the technology as wacky pseudoscience. One technology that helped make this flight possible. Algae-derived bioFox News pundit mocked the notion of finding fuel “in your swimming fuel, he said, was part of a larger national plan to wean us from foreign pool when the pool man’s on vacation.” Newt Gingrich tried to make petroleum while significantly reducing atmospheric carbon levels.
60
gallons of biofuel produced per acre, per year from soybeans
400
gallons of biofuel produced per acre, per year from corn
5,000
gallons of biofuel Potentially produced per acre, per year from algae
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FRONTLINES
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This technology has already been proved in the lab, and it’s now being proved in the marketplace
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the technology up to commercial scale by optimizing growing conditions. The implications—for our economy and our environment—could be huge. “We have literally invented the ability to design oil,” says Harrison Dillon, president and chief technology officer of Solazyme, the Bay Area company that sold its biofuel to United Continental Holdings for the Houston-to-Chicago flight last November. Though Dillon and his company’s co-founder began Solazyme nine years ago with an eye toward making biofuels alone, they soon discovered that their process—which involves feeding sugars to genetically optimized algae strains—allowed them to convert algae into almost any kind of oil, from jet diesel to cooking oil. As for the technology’s bête noire, Dillon thinks his company has overcome the scalability hurdle. “We’ve been performing this process at commercial scale for close to four years now,” he says. “We’ve delivered almost 200,000 gallons of fuel to the military, which has gone on to power helicopters, landing-craft ships, even a 563-foot destroyer.” Technically, Newt Gingrich was right: algae-derived gasoline won’t be coming out of any gas station pumps this summer. But there’s no question that this particular biofuel is coming soon to an internal combustion engine near you. Politicians and pundits, regardless of their party affiliation or ideological bent, should be embracing the slime—not sliming it.
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SHIPPING NEWS The EcoCradle wine shipper, from Ecovative, is made out of mushrooms and crop waste; it’s 100 percent biodegradable and takes far less energy to manufacture than Styrofoam does. $6 at mushroompackaging.com
STEEP, STIR, POUR, GROW
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hen facilities managers at Harvard
noticed that the grounds were looking distressed, Eric Fleisher knew just what was called for: tea and sympathy. The latter involved weaning the university’s grounds from harsh pesticides and synthetic fertilizers. And the tea came in the form of compost tea: a solution that’s “brewed” by depositing beneficial organisms found in compost into water, which can then be applied to soil. Fleisher, the director of horticulture at the Battery Park City Parks Conservancy in New York, is the guru of tea composting. Having already used it to green up lower Manhattan, he was able to persuade Harvard to brew some. The astounding results, he says, are due to the fact that unlike chemical fertilizers, compost tea nurtures “diversity in the soil, which helps plants metabolize nutrients. It’s not a question of pushing the chemical aspect of the soil. You’re looking at it as a living system.” Since the Harvard experiment, interest in homebrewing the tea has grown—but Fleisher cautions gardeners that the process isn’t as simple as making a cup of Earl Grey. All the same, homebrewing kits are easily found online at sites such as simplici-tea.com and growingsolutions.com.
a comeback on the tarmac
F
requent fliers grumble
that they “live” in airports—but the El Segundo blue butterfly sure isn’t complaining. Back in 1986, officials at Los Angeles International Airport created a preserve at the end of its runways for the endangered butterfly’s sole food source as a caterpillar. It worked: according to a January 2012 report, the population of butterflies at LAX has climbed from an alltime low of roughly 500 to nearly 125,000.
left, top to bottom: brett bayer; ecovative; courtesy of larry orsak/the xerces society for invertebrate conservation; illustration by Joyce Hesselberth
the very idea of algal oil into a laugh line, at one point holding up a gas-pump nozzle at a filling-station photo op and proclaiming: “There is no algae that’s gonna come out of this, this summer.” The truth is, algae-derived hydrocarbon has been something of a biofuel holy grail for decades now. Scientists have long known that the yucky green film commonly found covering ponds and poorly tended fish tanks can take two of the planet’s easiest-to-find ingredients—light and CO2—and turn them into one of the scarcest: oil. And the word renewable doesn’t quite do this biofuel feedstock justice: a patch of algae can double in size in a few hours. The chemical aspects of this conversion are widely understood; the problem, from a commercial standpoint, has always been one of scalability. But innovation is finally catching up to scientists’ enthusiasm. A number of companies are figuring out ways to bring
FRONTLINES
of natural resources management and also helped organize local opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline. The science-policy journalist Paul Tullis caught up with him at the National Farmers Union’s annual convention, held in March in Omaha, to learn what family farmers hope will be coming out of Capitol Hill later this year. What are farmers telling you are the biggest challenges they face today?
In the past they’ve struggled with chronically low grain
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prices. This worked very well for farmers, and with a minimum cost to taxpayers we had a stable, sustainable system. After World War II, though, commodities traders worked to destabilize the farm program, to turn production loose and let prices loose, so that grain farmers would be forced to do business from a more vulnerable position. Now we’re moving away from a traditional system of independent family-farm owneroperators to a raw-materials procurement system. The same
Something’s wrong when your own local school can’t buy locally sourced products because the USDA won’t allow it
John Hansen is a voice for independent farmers on Capitol Hill.
the barnstormer Our agricultural policy used to be designed with farmers in mind. Then Big Ag took it over. Can it be won back? Roughly ever y five years,
Congress passes a new version of the farm bill. Many people already know that the bill provides income support for farmers; fewer are aware of the large role it plays in land conservation efforts, agricultural research, food-safety an interview with issues, and food-assistance programs. john hansen The latest iteration of the bill expires by paul tullis on September 30, setting the stage for substantial legislative action on our nation’s agricultural policy. With powerful lobbies and members of Congress saying that it’s time to “rethink” agricultural subsidies, this year’s bill promises to be especially contentious. And since budgetary austerity has become the new normal, competing interests will now be fighting for pieces of a smaller pie. John Hansen has been involved with every farm bill since 1972. He tended the same 1,500 acres of northeastern Nebraska land that has been in his family for six generations until he was elected president of the Nebraska Farmers Union 23 years ago. As an advocate for his state’s farmers, he helped establish guidelines for Nebraska’s system 2 0 onearth
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prices. Lately, there have been a lot of farms lost because of a lack of affordable, accessible health insurance. And there’s less competition and more market concentration, which affects the traditional family farm-andranch operation that used to balance out between either higher grain prices or higher livestock prices. A lot of those folks have gone out of business. Agriculture is energy-intensive, so volatility in the energy sector directly impacts costs. Other businesses can pass the costs of production on, but when we have higher expenses, there’s no going to the sale barn and saying, “Based on my insurance or my energy costs, you’re just going to have to bid higher for these calves.” That’s not the way the system works. The first farm bill, which was part of the New Deal, introduced price supports to help family farmers. How did we get from there to where we are today, with many seeing the farm bill as a mechanism by which Congress writes giant checks to agribusiness?
The original farm program provided a floor for commodity
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architects of that shift are driving our agricultural policy, and they use their financial resources very effectively to support candidates who see things their way. It’s hard to lose a horse race if you own all of the horses. What would the Farmers Union like to see changed in the upcoming farm bill to make the system more fair to family farmers?
Prior to 1996, farm bills were able to use a variety of tools to protect farmers from extremely low prices and wild market swings. These protections were slowly chipped away at over the years, and finally, in ’96, bankers and commodities traders, thanks to their friends in Congress, got rid of that structure. So now we have subsidies that pay farmers to make up the difference between their costs and what the market pays them. We’re hoping that the new bill will once again provide a floor for commodity prices so farmers will get a fair price for what they produce. It would be simpler than what we have now, and it would provide the same level of protection for
left: photograph for onearth by Danuta Otfinowski; right: ryan hayter/hayter communications
farm team captain
half of what we’re spending. It’s so commonsensical and so rational that it’s obviously an uphill climb in Congress. What does the bill do to encourage farmers to help the environment?
The farm bill provides cost-share assistance for producers to install conservation provisions on their land, such as diverting pesticide runoff from rivers and streams. It also gives farmers an incentive to retire marginally productive acres that are very erosive, which ends up providing additional habitat for wildlife. Par t of the challenge is to fashion a national policy flexible enough to meet different natural resource challenges. In Nebraska, for example, we’ve got some of the richest, most productive farmland in the world in the Platte Valley. And the relationship between the Platte River and pump irrigation is very different than it is on the western end of the state, where we have a semiarid desert plateau. Then there’s the fact that we have a substantial wind erosion problem in the hills of eastern Nebraska. Not to mention all the wetlands we have. So just in one state there’s a lot of issues. It’s not ever simple. How did the last farm bill include renewable energy in its programs?
One way it did was by continuing to encourage the development of fuel stocks for cellulosic ethanol. We’re still about three years away from the practical commercial implementation of cellulosic ethanol. That’s been my position for the last 15 years, and I’m sure as hell not changing it now! [Laughs.] We helped create a cost-sharing mechanism for farmers who want to convert to renewables like wind. We’ve also helped smaller farms convert from diesel to electric generation. A large portion of total farm bill funding goes to food assistance pro-
grams. Since less-expensive food is often less healthy, what can be done to help needy families receive a better product?
Most folks don’t understand that almost three-fourths of the funds go to food stamps and school lunches. The percentage of kids who are getting their primary meal for the day at school is alarming—and yes, that meal needs to be better than the one they’re currently getting. There’s extra produce out there that could be used in the schools, but the Department of Agriculture has been taking it off the market in certain situations. Unfortunately, we’ve bureaucratized the process; common sense has fled the scene. Something’s wrong when your own local school can’t buy locally sourced products because the USDA won’t allow it. Finally, what choices can urban and suburban dwellers make to help America’s farmers?
If you ask consumers whom they want to get their food from, they consistently say family farmers. Yet the farm policy we have is to a large extent controlled by special interests. When you look at the amount of money agribusiness spends in the political process, it’s sobering. Still, we’re encouraged that consumers who want to know where their food comes from support things like country-of-origin labeling; that they’re buying more locally sourced products through family farmers and farmers’ markets; and that they’re just making more-informed buying decisions generally. That’s a very positive partnership—and one that some Big Ag groups feel very threatened by, by the way. We want to make sure the food we produce is safe and nutritious. And we welcome the opportunity to get to know our customers. It’s usually a beneficial arrangement when we can shorten the distance between food producers and food consumers.
this place is a dive Off Florida’s coast, intrepid souls can aid science while acting out their Captain Nemo fantasies
S
ure, scuba diving’s fine for observing ocean
life—if you can’t swing a submarine. Now OceanGate, a Florida-based ocean exploration company, is offering citizen scientists a chance to plumb the watery depths in an actual submersible. A ticket can run anywhere from $2,500 to $45,000, depending on the length and type of experience, but here’s the thing: each paying passenger is helping to finance scientific research that takes place during the course of the trip. What’s more, passengers undergo special training before the descent, effectively making them temporary members of the research crew. OceanGate is modeled after other citizen-science programs that allow clients to experience nature up close while financially supporting research or preservation efforts. All projects are suggested and put together by scientists; a current one, carried out in conjunction with Miami-Dade County, is exploring the artificial reefs off the Miami coast. Co-founder Guillermo Söhnlein says that because it’s hard to predict how each experience will unfold, “no two dives are the same.” The actual amount of time spent in the submarine is measured in hours. (To answer a commonly asked question: no, there are no bathrooms on board.) The more expensive trips occur farther out at sea and might include a weeklong stay on a boat; cheaper trips are completed in a single day closer to shore. While OceanGate currently owns only one sub, the company is planning to add several more in the next five years, including one that will dive to nearly 20,000 feet. For —susan e. matthews more, visit opentheoceans.com.
get down tonight Your submarine is waiting.
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FRONTLINES
grape expectations
The vintner gave Parducci Wine Cellars a second chance.
the fruits of his labors
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Tim Thornhill took an aging, ailing winery and turned it into a model of sustainable viniculture By laura fraser
hen Tim Thornhill moved to a
ranch in the hills near Ukiah, California, in 2002, he didn’t plan to become a vintner. The former landscape contractor—whose voice still carries the soft twang of his Houston upbringing—had relocated with a single goal in mind: to build a “paradise” for his family. Thornhill had started his landscape business back in Texas with little more than a wheelbarrow and a pickup truck, and then moved to Orlando, Florida, where he spent more than 10 years working on Disney theme parks and resort hotels. But within two years of settling in Mendocino County, Thornhill and his brother, Tom, began eyeing a nearby parcel of land that had come up for sale. The Parducci winery, the oldest in the county, was an anchor of local viniculture. But the property itself had seen better days. The regular application of petroleum-based pesticides, fungicides, and herbicides had distressed the vines. Wastewater polluted with oxygen-depleting wine sugars flowed into a cabernet-colored pond that was covered with scum and “was at risk of being in violation
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of state environmental regulations,” Thornhill recalls. Sensing the potential for rebirth, the brothers bought the winery anyway. When Thornhill promised his new employees that there would one day be a cleaned-up pond bordered by picnic tables and a bird sanctuary, they didn’t believe him. But little by little he began to change the way things were done at Parducci, and to change minds. Over the past eight years, Thornhill has turned Parducci into the nation’s greenest winery. Today, all of its electricity comes from solar or wind sources. Petroleum-based fertilizers have been replaced by natural soil amend-ments, including manure and pomace (discarded grape seeds, skins, and stems), which nourish the vineyard’s certifiedorganic grapes.Wine labels are now made of 100 percent postconsumer recycled paper; boxes are made from recycled, chlorinefree cardboard; all inks are soy- or water-based. Company vehicles and farm equipment run only on renewable, low-emissions biodiesel. One of the biggest challenges, Thornhill says, was rethinking the vineyard’s relationship with water. A three-days-a-week watering schedule had become entrenched at Parducci, simply because
Manure and pomace (discarded grape seeds, skins, and stems) nourish the vineyard’s organic grapes
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HOLD THE LAVA, PLEASE
A wheel deal This summer the Big Apple is getting its very own European-style bike-share program, designed to encourage use of the city’s 700 miles of bike lanes. Stations across the city will hold up to 10,000 bicycles, which will be available 24 hours a day; annual membership will cost less than a monthly subway pass. Similar
Restaurant in the Canary Islands offers a dining
experience in a rather unlikely place: atop a volcano. At El Diablo, on the island of Lanzarote, visitors can take in dramatic views of Timanfaya National Park while enjoying beef, fish, and poultry hot off the barbecue. The barbecue, in this case, is a grill placed over a hole in the ground that channels geothermal heat, which remains consistently above a roasty 750 degrees Fahrenheit year-round. Scientists say there’s little danger that a meal will be cut short by a sudden eruption: the volcano has been dormant for close to 200 years. El Diablo, Montañas del Fuego, —amy kraft Lanzarote (+34) 928 840 057.
programs are already in Washington, D.C., and Boston; Chicago and Chattanooga plan to shift into gear later this year. Learn more at nycitybikeshare.com.
A GOOD, CLEAN FIGHT 6.2
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“Most of the people who think climate change isn’t real are the same people who think pro wrestling is.” —seth meyers
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commercialization
says who?
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OPPOSITE: photograph for Onearth by timothy archibald; illustration by zacH trenholm; top center: vito aluia/getty images; top RIGHT: david stares/alamy
“that was the way it had always been done” over the winery’s 80-year history. Thornhill replaced the sole water meter with 27 new tensiometers, which measure soil moisture with pinpoint accuracy. He eventually cut water use by 20 percent. “Now we might not even have to water at all in the course of a given week,” he says. Thornhill also upended conventional wisdom on vine maintenance. Instead of spraying for aphids, he planted rows of wildflowers between vines to provide habitat for aphideating insects. To keep the rodent population down, he built owl boxes. The most impressive habitat on the property is the bird sanctuary and wetlands—formerly known as “the scummy pond.” The winery’s wastewater has a high sugar content, which creates an untenably high biochemical oxygen demand (BOD) burden, depleting the available oxygen in the water for fish and other organisms. To reduce the sugar before the wastewater went into the pond, the wastewater needed to be aerated, so Thornhill devised a clever system employing gravity, waterfalls, and “trickle towers” that he crafted from used winebarrel racks. Now wastewater flows downhill from the winery and cascades over these towers, which not only aerate the water but also provide habitat for filamentous fungi, algae-like organisms that eat sugar. Since he cleaned up the pond, the area has become a sanctuary for all manner of egrets, herons, and wood ducks. (Thornhill has also spotted frogs, turtles, muskrats, otters—and teenagers—sneaking in to swim in the clear water.) Wine critics have taken note of how much Parducci’s output has improved since Thornhill began his cleanup campaign, a correlation the winemaker ascribes to “better balanced vines, better balanced fruit, and better balanced wine.” There’s probably no prettier place in Mendocino County to sit with a glass of pinot noir and contemplate the mountains than right next to what used to be a stinky, scummy wastewater pond.
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Denmark
united states
china
In the Global Cleantech Innovation Index’s survey of 38 countries, which compared their advances in clean technology and assigned them a numerical score, we were edged out by Denmark when it came to evidence of emerging clean tech, which includes both the number of start-ups and environmental patents issued. The Danes trounced us, though, at full-scale clean-tech commercialization. While we’ve been good at nurturing start-ups with venture capital and public R&D money, we’re not so good at buying what these start-ups have to sell: commercialization is defined partly by corporate revenues and the amount of renewable energy consumed, relative to GDP. Here we trail Denmark—and China, though its centralized economy and massive domestic demand give it an advantage.
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the synthesist
by alan burdick
promises to liberate us from entangling cords and could help keep heaps of non-rechargeable batteries out of landfills. Auto companies are especially keen on using wireless electricity to charge the next generation of electric cars. In a favorite scenario, a parking space or garage could be outfitted with an electrified magnetic coil in the pavement; your car would carry its passive magnetic mate. You would need only park above the coil (and pay, of course) to recharge, plug-free. Qualcomm, a leading mobile-tech firm, is now working with automakers to get passive magnets into new cars by 2014. Could wireless electricity be applied to moving cars? Using a series of computer models, the Stanford group proposed that if magnetic coils were bent at a 90-degree angle, placed in front of metal plates, and embedded in the road, they could transmit 10 kilowatts of power within milliseconds—plenty fast and sufficiently powerful to charge a car zipping above. They could do so, moreover, from several feet away, while buried in asphalt, and with 97 percent efficiency. An electrified road would consist of a string of these embedded coils attached to a power line; cars, each with its own coil, would drive along the road as normal. Sassoon concedes there are countless questions to be answered. How might the metal chassis of the car alter the transfer of electricity? How far apart should the coils be placed to achieve ideal transfer efficiency? And safety is of paramount concern. Magnetic fields interact only weakly with living tissue, so the 97 percent of energy that reaches its target coil in the car would appear to pose no health risk. But what becomes of the other 3 percent? Would it be lost safely as waste heat, or as harmful radiation? Even after various models and tests and mock-ups, Sassoon hroughout the history of human admits, an actual electric road is probably at least a decade away. travel, roads have helped to speed us from one One can imagine other concerns, both logistical and economical. destination to the next; they have paved the way to the future. Yet they do nothing but lie there. Roads How much of this new magnetized road would be built, and at what cost to taxpayers? Wouldn’t it be quicker and cheaper to let private empower us, but they provide no actual power. investors continue building recharging stations, rather than wait for That could change, once electric vehicles gain traction. With zero emissions, EVs are environ- some government initiative—or, more likely, some tangled publicprivate consortium—to retrofit streets and roadways? mentally appealing, but some say their range (100 Were it ever to be built, though, an electric highway would offer miles per charge), recharge times (from 30 minutes to several hours), and the scarcity of charging stations make them less than convenient. some intriguing possibilities. Since drivers would pay to recharge while “One problem with electric vehicles,” says Richard Sassoon, managing in motion, the road would effectively be a tollway. Traffic congestion could then be managed by lowering the recharge fee during off-peak director of Stanford University’s Global Climate & Energy Project, “is travel hours. Moreover, Sassoon notes, the system in the road would that it’s difficult to get electricity into the vehicles.” know the position of one’s car to within inches, far Sassoon thinks the road could do that work for us. visit onearth.org more precisely than GPS. Theoretically, that could In a paper published last November, he and several for more coverage of science, technology, one day evolve into a system that actually drives Stanford researchers demonstrated theoretically and their impact on the environment. onearth.org/scitech your car for you. “I can imagine down the road—no how magnetic coils embedded in pavement could pun intended—both wireless power transfer and enable roads to send power wirelessly to electric vehicles that pass over them. Consider it: you could end up with more self-driving autonomous vehicles,” he says. The future road will obviate the need for a driver. It will provide charge in your battery at the end of a trip than when you started. Our lives have grown increasingly wireless in recent years; electric- power as well as disempower. Maybe that’s a good thing. In the twenity is the inevitable next step. In 2007 researchers at MIT showed that tieth century, the road manifested freedom: the ability of the individual if two magnetic coils are tuned to resonate at the same frequency, to strike out, get lost, shed consequences. The result? Air pollution, oil dependency, climate change. The old road is going nowhere fast. electricity can be efficiently transferred between them from several feet apart. The technology was spun off into WiTricity, one of several companies now working to build wireless electricity into televisions, Alan Burdick, a contributing editor and regular columnist for OnEarth, is the cell phones, and other consumer gadgets. The advance, if realized, author of Out of Eden (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
electric avenue
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illustration by jesse lefkowitz
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this brand is your brand
B
by rob walker
randing, the name for the
elaborate and sophisticated efforts that companies and their
marketers use to make one widget seem cooler than another by infusing it with emotional or cultural meaning, is practically synonymous with cajoling us to buy more new stuff—from T-shirts to gadgets to cars—whether we need it or not. And if your old stuff happens to end up in a
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landfill before its time, well, sorry. That’s not a problem that branding was designed to address. This has inspired a relatively small but vigorous anti-branding movement that sees corporate brands as the crude emblems of our materialistic age. One form it takes is caustic criticism aimed at com-mercial persuaders in magazines like Adbusters, which mocks the machinery of the marketplace through fake ads that subversively mimic real ones, a practice known as subvertising. And you see it in the provocative, culture-jamming works of guerrilla artists like Ron English, who illegally hijacks billboards, altering their texts and images to make his own politically charged points about consumption. As someone who writes often about branding and marketing, I spend a lot of time thinking about the crucial roles they play in our ever-accelerating consumer culture. And while I can appreciate a culture-jammed billboard or a cleverly conceived fake ad as much as the next guy, I also wonder if there might be a more effective, and possibly even more subversive, line of attack against the endless cycle of purchase and disposal in which branding is implicated. What about a strategy that didn’t deny or attack the idea of the brand but instead appropriated it—effectively branding efforts like recycling and creative reuse? Now, I’m not naïve. I know there’s never going to be a massive advertising campaign telling you how sexy you’ll be if you just hang on to your car for another 20,000 miles, or how cool it is to rediscover some long-forgotten shirt or dress that’s been languishing in the back of your closet for years. Nevertheless, the idea of branding things you already own appeals to me for a couple of reasons. First, it aims to create value rather than undermine or diminish it. Second, this idea could potentially shift consumer attitudes regarding the value of “newness.” Whatever the effect of any given advertisement may be, the cumulative message of the branded marketplace—and frankly, this includes green products as much as it does others—boils down to celebrating the new and simultaneously making you feel just a little self-conscious about the old. What interests me is the possibility of flipping this dynamic inside-out: conferring coolness on something because it’s already owned and, more specifically, because someone has figured out how to re-tailor, redefine or repurpose it. Around the same time that I was mulling over these ideas, some like-minded collaborators and I co-founded a group blog that we called Unconsumption (unconsumption.tumblr.com). Our initial idea was to highlight inspiring examples of creative reuse and maybe, in the process, help slow the arrival of prematurely disposed-of objects into landfills. We’ve built up a nice audience—we have more than 20,000 followers at the moment—but at some point we decided that, like any growth-minded enterprise, we needed a logo. One of our colleagues created a symbol we began referring to as “Mr. Cart”: an upside-down shopping cart, flashing a smile. It was the perfect image, we all thought, to represent the Unconsumption project. So now we had a brand! Given the nature of our endeavor, though, producing branded merchandise was out of the question. As much as I loved our adorable new logo, we had no products to emblazon.
illustration by matthew daley
living green
But there was an obvious, not to mention philosophically consistent, make it into the annals of advertising history. (After all, the Nikes and alternative: brand things that already exist. Starbucks of the world spend millions making their logos familiar; Specifically, we invited a few crafty masters of creative reuse the Unconsumption marketing budget for the current fiscal year (the sort we feature on Unconsumption all the time) to repurpose is precisely $0.) In one sense, Mr. Cart has something in common Mr. Cart. One of them converted some used bottles into bud vases, with those parodies in Adbusters: we’re making a point, not building featuring Mr. Cart rendered in glass-etching cream, as well as a pair a business. Indeed, not building a business is part of the point. of earrings depicting Mr. (and Ms.!) Cart, fashioned from recycled One of my Unconsumption colleagues has dubbed these Mr. Cart– plastic. Another used a vinyl cutter and a ceramic kiln to transform branded objects “The Uncollection,” and that wry reversal of fashionsome secondhand Art Deco plates into genuine Mr. Cart tableware. industry lingo is right on target. For starters, there’s never going to be One contributor embroidered the logo onto a previously plain T-shirt. an exclusive fall line or a spring collection of Unconsumption anything. Interestingly, she flipped the logo, so it looks “right” only to the Our brand is actually the opposite of exclusive, since it is brought into person wearing it; for everyone else, what seems to be a frowning existence, object by object, through the actions of whoever chooses shopping cart serves as a potential conversation starter. to participate in our collaborative creative-reuse project. Needless to say, a conventional brand would never allow its Of course, requiring hands-on participation from others neceslogo to appear wrong side up. But we decided to encourage others sarily limits Mr. Cart’s ability to penetrate the mass psyche through to tweak, remix, customize, and/or generally mess with Mr. Cart. conventional means. But impractical as it may be, I like the idea of Through a Creative Commons a meaningful brand with no new license, we’ve made the Unwidgets—a brand that marks consumption logo available to things you already own. Yes: you. There’s never going to be a massive anybody who wants to use it to Should you ever feel the urge to advertising campaign telling you how breathe fresh life into any old signal your eco-consciousness sexy you’ll be if you just hang on to your thing. So when one reader sent while shopping at the farmers’ car for another 20,000 miles us pictures of a tote bag she’d market, you needn’t acquire a new fashioned out of an old T-shirt— eco-branded tote bag to do it. Inand snazzed up by inkjet-printing stead, take the lamest giveaway Mr. Cart onto it—we were thrilled. tote that’s been sitting in a forgotten corner of the laundry room and As you’ve probably deduced by now, what we’re up to with this is smack Mr. Cart over whatever logo it already carries. Then smile: more of an intellectual provocation than a straight-faced attempt to you’ve just joined an international community of simpatico souls and added branded “value” to something that only minutes earlier you had probably regarded as pretty worthless. SHORT TAKE Again, I’m not naïve. I have no illusions that creative rebranding, on any scale, is the road to sustainability. Solving our environmental problems will require genuine and lasting changes in regulatory policy, business practice, and consumer behavior, both in the United States “Creative reuse”—the refashioning of and around the world. discarded things (often household items) into art, But here’s why converting the “brand” idea into something that might inspire action, even on a small scale, matters. I once heard jewelry, décor, or useful objects—has taken off in the Joseph Reser, who teaches psychology at Griffith University in Austrapast few years. What began as a shared inclination lia, make the case that there are real benefits to small, individual acts. among hobbyists has blossomed into a movement. He was responding to arguments—you’ve heard them—that this or Creative-reuse centers have popped up in cities all that individual-level behavior makes no measurable difference in the face of a challenge like, say, climate change. Even when that’s techniover America, offering thrifty—not to mention crafty— cally true, Reser countered, every such action does some calculable visionaries a one-stop source for shopping and ingood. “It’s psychologically very important,” he said. “It’s motivating, spiration: think a combination thrift store, art studio validating, and [individuals] can feel they are part of the solution.” and learning facility. One of them, Lancaster Creative What’s useful about this insight is that making consumers “feel they are part of” some bigger idea, or movement, or group, or social Reuse, in Pennsylvania, offers visitors to its website a class, is the very thing that branding does so effectively. So while directory of dozens of such centers nationwide, and we’re all waiting for consumer-culture critics to dismantle the comthrows in some European and Australian ones for good mercial persuasion industry, maybe it’s worth trying something else: measure. Visit lancastercreativereuse.org stealing the essence of branding’s appeal and using it to inspire behavior that feels like part of the solution, rather than part of the problem.
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One Man’s Trash ...
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Sea of Wonders Saving the underwater riches of Mexico’s Sea of Cortez by Tim Folger • photographs by Octavio Aburto
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school days Grant Galland, a Ph.D. student in marine ecology at the Scripps Institution, records the spawning behavior of the bigeye trevally.
N
ight has fallen on the Sea of Cortez,
and it’s so dark I can barely see my three companions, even though they’re just a few feet away. We’re camping on a sandy cove on the craggy western shore of Espíritu Santo Island, an uninhabited nature reserve near the southeastern end of Mexico’s Baja California peninsula. Tonight we have the entire island to ourselves, all 40 sere square miles of it. Eroded volcanic cliffs rise steeply behind us; small waves break gently on the beach—above it all, a vault of stars. A perfect desert-island idyll; no one disturbs our solitude. And that’s not good. “Every semester I come here to camp with my students,” says Carlos Sánchez Ortiz, who is sitting on a plastic cooler, his feet stretched out in sand that’s still warm on this late August night. “Only once in 20 years has PROFEPA checked on us.” PROFEPA—short for Procuraduría Federal de Protección al Ambiente—is Mexico’s environmental protection agency; its conscientious but overstretched agents oversee the country’s national parks and other natural refuges. “They found us here one night last year and asked for our camping permits,” says Sánchez Ortiz, a professor of marine biology at the Autonomous University of Baja California Sur in La Paz. “It was 11 o’clock, and I told them I was glad to see them, because this island needs protection. I asked them how many times they came here, and they told me once a week, or sometimes just once a month, because the funding from Mexico City had disappeared. If you look at a map of the Sea of Cortez, you’ll see that many natural areas are listed as protected. But there is almost no enforcement.” Espíritu Santo is but one of more than 900 islands in the Sea of Cortez. The sea itself—also known as the Gulf of California—extends some 750 miles, from the dried-up Colorado River delta in the north to the resort city of Cabo San Lucas at the southern tip of the Baja peninsula. During the past two decades the Mexican government has created 11 marine protected areas in the Sea of Cortez. The intention was to promote sustainable fishing practices: gill nets and trawling are banned, and a few small areas have been designated as no-take zones, where fishing is completely prohibited, at least in theory. In practice, the laws are largely ignored. The Sea of Cortez is the world’s youngest sea, having formed 5.6 million years ago when part of the tectonic plate beneath the Pacific Ocean broke away from North America. It is one of the most biologically diverse bodies of water on earth. Jacques Cousteau, the famed French diver and ocean explorer, called it the world’s aquarium. Rare and spectacular marine mammals breed and feed here, including
the largest animal that has ever existed—the blue whale—and the smallest member of the marine cetacean family and one of the most endangered, the four-foot-long vaquita, Phocoena sinus. Only 200 or so of these porpoises remain in the wild, all in the northern end of the Sea of Cortez. Nearly a thousand species of fish dwell here, and at least 5,000 invertebrate species—no one knows the true number. Hundreds of bird species nest on the sea’s islands. Some biologists think that the region’s 6,000 recorded species might fall short of the actual total by as much as 30 percent. For all that remarkable diversity, the Sea of Cortez is a sea in decline. Cousteau might also have called it Mexico’s fish market. Every year fishermen take more than 500,000 tons of seafood from the sea, representing about half of Mexico’s fishing economy. (The Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific account for the rest.) That annual catch counts only the fish brought to market; estimates of unwanted bycatch of fish and marine mammals range wildly, from one million tons to three million tons. The destruction began in the 1930s, when the arrival of outboard motors and gill nets transformed fishing here. Shrimp trawlers do the most damage. For every pound of wild shrimp caught, trawlers kill as much as 40 pounds of bycatch. Using nets weighted with heavy chains that dig as much as a foot into the sea floor, the trawlers scrape virtually any seabed shallower than 300 feet, dredging the bottom year after year in a maritime version of clear-cutting. The wild shrimp fishery in the northern Sea of Cortez has virtually collapsed. In the last several decades, five species of sea turtle have all but disappeared from these waters. Thousands of illegal vessels are in operation throughout the gulf, and poaching is common. Honest fishermen struggle to make a living, as I learn when two fishing boats pull up on the beach at Espíritu Santo just as we’re breaking camp on an overcast morning. Five men arrive in the two pangas, high-bowed, narrow-beamed fiberglass boats popular with Sea of Cortez fishermen. They’re here seeking shelter from the rain that threatens to start at any moment. They’ve barely pulled their pangas onto the beach when the storm hits; warm sheets of rain send us all running for cover beneath a rock overhang at the base of a cliff. While the rain merges with the sea, one of the men tells us that he’s been fishing in this area for 30 years, since he was a boy, and complains that he now needs a pocketful of permits to fish where he’s always fished. He obeys the law and avoids the protected areas, and as a result his catches are far smaller than they used to be. Before the
this article was made possible by the jonathan and maxine marshall fund for environmental journalism 3 0 onearth
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protected areas were established, he would typically net more than 200 pounds of fish in a couple of days. Now it takes a week. In any case, he says, the protected areas are plagued by illegal fishing, which usually takes place at night. He tells us he knows many fishermen who break the law. Some of them are family members and neighbors. He would never report them, he says, because they’re just trying to make a living. The other four men agree. Sánchez Ortiz confirms the fisherman’s assessment. Almost without exception, he says, the protected areas in the Sea of Cortez are not rebounding. For the past 14 years, he and his students have been making careful surveys of crucial habitats here, counting the number of species in selected areas almost yard by yard. The data are grim. Recovery efforts, hamstrung by lack of enforcement, have largely failed. “In almost all the Sea of Cortez, even where it is protected, the sizes and numbers of fish today are less than 10 years ago,” he says.
map by joe lemonnier; illustration by bruce morser
T
he Mercado Municipal bustles on a steamy
August morning in La Paz. As electric fans whirl overhead and music blares from radios, dozens of workers chop and clean recently deceased denizens of the Sea of Cortez, prepping them for the day’s shoppers. “You can trace the history of the sea in this market. It is one of the oldest in La Paz,” Sánchez Ortiz tells me as we walk the market’s ocher tiled floors, passing green plastic bins filled with ice and fish. “Twenty years ago you would see mostly yellow snapper and leopard grouper. They are the best to eat. Now they sell more sand perch, tilefish, and others that used to be thrown back.” And all the fish in the market are much smaller than they used to be—the average length of caught fish has decreased by more than 17 inches in the past 20 years. As we pass a glistening display of yellow snappers, none exceeding a foot in length, Sánchez Ortiz pauses, spreads his hands about three feet apart, and says, “I used to see them this big.” The market is dominated by fish that wouldn’t have appeared on anyone’s plate 10 or 20 years ago. “You can see from looking at the fish here that we’re going deeper into the sea to catch them and fishing further down the food web,” says Octavio Aburto Oropeza, a 39-year-old marine biologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. He is also an accomplished photographer, and has spent many hours underwater capturing images of exquisite beauty in the Sea of Cortez. A native of Mexico City, he came to La Paz in 1990 to study marine biology at the university here; at the time, it was the only campus in Mexico with a full-fledged program. He became one of Sánchez Ortiz’s students, and they still collaborate frequently. In 2009 they were part of a research team that conducted an extensive survey of the Sea of Cortez, documenting the effects of overfishing and habitat loss. Fish have completely disappeared from some reefs in the northern part of the sea. The absence of grazing fish may explain why bacteria now cover the reefs, a phenomenon referred to by one of the researchers as the rise of the slime. For much of the past decade, Aburto Oropeza has been working with scientists in the United States and Mexico to identify habitats that are crucial for the long-term viability of fisheries in the Sea of Cortez. His research suggests a practical and economical conservation strategy: to save the sea, and the livelihoods of those who depend on its bounty, it might be enough to protect—with effective enforcement—a few key clearly defined areas.
nrdc the right questions
Amanda Maxwell Director of Latin America projects in NRDC’s international program, based in Washington, D.C.
The siren song of megatourist developments such as the one planned for Cabo Pulmo is always the number of jobs they create. How can this community’s alternative model of ecotourism hope to compete? The residents of Cabo Pulmo have proved that tourist development and sustainability are not mutually exclusive; in fact, they can be mutually beneficial. And Cabo Pulmo is not the only model that’s out there. A whole range of options exists that can simultaneously create jobs and protect the environment. The key is for developers to ask the right questions and for local communities, which know the area best and depend on its resources the most, to be part of the decision-making process. How does the new Cabo Cortés resort fit into that picture? If Cabo Pulmo represents the positive extreme of the tourism spectrum, the Cabo Cortés model is the exact opposite. Its enormous size, coupled with its location—right next to Cabo Pulmo National Marine Park—makes it fundamentally incompatible with the protection of the environment. If it’s built, it could have serious impacts on local communities, and it would destroy the very wildlife that tourists would be going there to experience. Despite that, Cabo Cortés has already received several of the environmental permits it will need. Yes, unfortunately Mexico’s environment secretary approved various elements of the project in January 2011. However, several critical components were not approved, including the
marina and the water treatment and desalination plants. We were encouraged by the fact that last November the government announced that it would grant no new permits to Cabo Cortés until at least 2013, when new scientific data about the coastal currents in the Sea of Cortez will be available. In the meantime, local organizations have filed legal challenges to the existing permits, tens of thousands of Mexican citizens have signed a petition opposing Cabo Cortés, and the Mexican Senate has called on the secretary of the environment to testify about the permits that have been approved. So we— meaning the international coalition and the local communities fighting Cabo Cortés—have real hope that President Calderón will stop this project and that the local residents will be able to promote the sustainable growth of their region.
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Among those essential habitats are mangrove swamps. The Sea of Cortez marks the northernmost extent of mangroves on the Pacific side of the Americas. Mangroves thrive in shallow tidal lagoons, their stilt-like roots often permanently submerged. As a result of evaporation, tidal shallows can have higher salt concentrations than the sea itself. To survive in this arboricidal environment, mangroves have evolved some unique adaptations: their leaves exude excess salt crystals, and some species have snorkel roots, which grow up through the mud to obtain oxygen. At least a third of all the fish and shellfish caught by small-scale fishermen here spend part of their life cycle in the sheltering, rooty embrace of mangrove swamps. The trees also reduce coastal erosion and storm damage, although that fact seems to have been lost on the developers, cattle ranchers, and shrimp farmers who are cutting them down. (Farmed shrimp are typically raised in large rectangular pens, with networks of dikes. Mangroves are destroyed to make room for the pens and dikes, and to make the pens accessible.) Since the 1970s, parts of the Sea of Cortez have lost more than a quarter of their mangrove forests, and nationwide the rate of destruction has accelerated, with some 2 percent of the remaining mangroves across Mexico now being cleared each year. There’s a large mangrove swamp just 20 miles northeast of La Paz, but Sánchez Ortiz and Aburto Oropeza suggest a roundabout route so that I can see some of the coastal development in the region. We drive southeast and cross the mile-high granite peaks of the Sierra de la Laguna range. Descending to the coast, we pass large homes set in hills above the azure sea; an 18-hole golf course gleams greenly against parched brown headlands. The homes and course are part of a gated community called Bahía de los Sueños, or Bay of Dreams, where many American retirees spend the winter. Aburto Oropeza tells me that the developers chose not to use the bay’s original name, Ensenada de los Muertos, or Cove of the Dead, as it has been called since the late eighteenth century, when some Chinese sailors are said to have died of yellow fever there. We search in vain for a road that will give us better views of the coast, but all the side roads are private, and in some cases guarded. “Twenty years ago this area was pristine,” says Aburto Oropeza. “You could drive on these roads to nice beaches.” Sánchez Ortiz has arranged for one of the university’s pangas to meet us on the beach near the small town of El Sargento. After boarding the boat, we cruise north along the coast toward the mangrove swamp. It’s a hot, languid afternoon. White-sand beaches backed by umber cliffs cut with plunging, rocky arroyos mark the boundary between desert and sea. There’s not much development visible on this stretch of the coast; the beaches are empty. “This is the Baja I remember from years ago,” says Aburto Oropeza, as we relax beneath the panga’s blue awning. A short while later the reverie ends when we spot three men in a small skiff. They’re shirtless beneath the scorching sun, working hard, pulling in a net. A fourth man is underwater, breathing from a long hose attached to an air compressor, a practice that has come to be known as hookah diving. “This is very bad,” says Aburto Oropeza, as we pass the fishermen. Hookah diving is illegal and dangerous—divers frequently succumb to the bends. Despite the risks, though, it has spread rapidly in the Sea of Cortez in the past decade. Hookah divers sometimes spend hours walklife on the reef A group of Cortez rainbow wrasses, above, spawn on a coral bar in Cabo Pulmo, while yellowfin surgeonfish, below, graze on algae.
ing along the sea floor, usually near reefs, spearing fish and scooping up shellfish that nets alone can’t reach. Unlike the hookah fishermen we’ve spotted, who are breaking the law in broad daylight, most of these divers work at night, when fish seek shelter and rest in the reefs. The practice amounts to a desperate assault on the last refuges of many species. Leaving the fishermen in our wake, we soon round the headlands northeast of La Paz and enter Bahía Balandra, the site of a 350-acre mangrove swamp. “Many of the top predator species in the reefs come from the mangroves,” says Aburto Oropeza. The mangroves serve as a nursery for yellow snappers, blue crabs, and other commercially valuable species. After dropping anchor, Sánchez Ortiz, Aburto Oropeza, and I don snorkeling gear and slip into the warm, still water of the swamp. The water is only a few feet deep; our fins stir up silty clouds as we glide slowly along the outer fringe of the mangrove forest. Underwater, the mangroves’ algae-covered roots are thick and furry and form an almost impenetrable living labyrinth. Small schools of mojarra— slender, silvery fish an inch or two long—swim placidly past my face. When I come up for air, Sánchez Ortiz tells me to push and pull myself as far as I can into the roots. “You should be able to see some yellow snappers here,” he says. He’s right. In the gauzy green light among the roots, a few juvenile snappers dart away from me; they’re bright yellow, maybe four inches long. They began life far offshore, hatching from eggs near the many seamounts—underwater mountains whose peaks don’t breach the surface—in the Sea of Cortez. They’ll spend 10 months to a year in this tidal nursery, feasting on crabs, oysters, and mojarra before heading back out to sea. Without the mangroves, there would be no yellow snappers, many shellfish would vanish, and the fishing economy of the Sea of Cortez would be crippled. “How much is one hectare of mangrove ecosystem worth?” Aburto Oropeza asks. Four years ago, in a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, he and several colleagues gave a precise answer to that question. They studied 13 fishing grounds in the Sea of Cortez and found that the number of fish caught in each area depended on the size of the closest mangrove swamp. “We used a huge database from the national commission of fisheries and aquaculture and some data about mangrove coverage using satellite images,” Aburto Oropeza tells me. The study was the first to assess the economic value of the country’s mangrove forests. Aburto Oropeza hopes that studies like this, which document the economic benefits of conservation practices, will persuade the government to outlaw highly destructive enterprises that purport to benefit the economy. What is lost, after all, by chopping down a few acres of trees in a swamp? “We were able to calculate that one hectare of mangroves produces about $37,500 worth of fish and shellfish per year,” says Aburto Oropeza. “Every year all these mangroves produce something like 11,000 tons of fishery products for the region. And that represents nearly $19 million a year for the fishing communities of the Sea of Cortez. Now the challenge is to find the political will to protect these resources.”
P
erhaps the biggest problem confronting the
current conservation effort is that the 11 existing protected areas of the Sea of Cortez are too large to patrol with limited resources. “I was at a meeting in the Yucatán recently where one of the top fisheries scientists for the Mexican government estimated that more than half of summer 2012
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all the fish captured in Mexico are captured illegally,” says Rick Brusca, a marine biologist who recently retired as director of conservation at the Arizona–Sonora Desert Museum, in Tucson. “That pretty much sums it up. And I don’t know if the prospects will improve anytime soon.” Over breakfast one morning in La Paz, I discuss the problem of enforcing Mexico’s environmental regulations with Aburto Oropeza and Carlos Navarro, a wildlife photographer. Aburto Oropeza believes there is an effective way to protect some of the sea’s most important fisheries that would also bring economic benefits. Many species of fish in the Sea of Cortez—and elsewhere in the world—reproduce by forming what scientists call spawning aggregations. A more apt term might be fish orgies. Tens of thousands of fish might swim for hundreds of miles to gather in dense, swirling eddies of courtship and sex, releasing clouds of eggs and sperm. The aggregations are often linked with rising tides and occur during new and full moons at a variety of favored locations, depending on the species—river mouths, seamounts, or reefs. One fish that spawns in aggregations is the Gulf corvina, Cynoscion othonopterus. Every spring, millions of them flock to the northernmost end of the Sea of Cortez, where the Colorado River emptied into the sea before it was dried up by the thirst of American farms and cities. They spawn during the full and new moons of February, March, and April, just before the strongest tides. After each spawning orgy, the fish depart with the tides, returning two weeks later to spawn again. “Fishermen know where to go,” says Aburto Oropeza. Over the course of the whole season, they catch as much as 4,500 tons of corvina. Starting in the 1950s, the exploitation of spawning aggregations led to the fish’s commercial extinction; it took 40 years for the species to recover, a recovery perhaps aided by the overfishing of sharks, the chief predator of corvina. Now the corvina aggregations are being plundered once again. “It’s a recipe for collapse,” says Aburto Oropeza. “There are 10 species that are the most important commercial species for small-scale fishermen in Baja Sur [the southern part of the Sea of Cortez], and eight of them form spawning aggregations.” He sketches a bar graph on a napkin. “Look,” he says. “This is the annual catch, and this is the percentage of the catch that is related to spawning aggregations.” Fishermen in the Sea of Cortez work year round, but they earn the bulk of their income during the spawning aggregations, when they pull in about 60 percent of their annual catch of these eight species in just three months. Aburto Oropeza says that in addition to the enforcement problem, the criteria for the sea’s protected areas are too broad and ill-defined to be effective. “The stated goals for the protected areas are to promote research and education and sustainable fisheries,” he says. But the government needs to enact more specific and better-informed policies. The first priority should be the protection of spawning aggregations. Most of the spawning sites are known, and because they are located in small areas, enforcement would be possible. “If you made spawning aggregations part of marine reserves,” he says, “the scenario in the Sea of Cortez would be completely different.” “If you have only a handful of inspectors, have those inspectors 3 4 onearth
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there for those few spawning days,” says Navarro. “It’s a no-brainer.” If the spawning aggregations and mangroves can be protected, the Sea of Cortez might yet be saved, and the disappearance of species halted. To give me a sense of what has already been lost, Navarro tells a story about an old photographer friend. “He was one of the first to photograph El Bajo, a seamount about an hour from here,” he says. “In 1980 he was looking for hammerhead sharks to photograph. He told me that when he got near El Bajo, he saw a big dark shape floating on the water, like an oil slick. When he got closer, he realized it was a solid concentration of whale sharks, marlin, and manta rays, with their fins sticking out of the water. He saw hammerheads, but there were so many other fish he could barely see them from the surface. I was in the same spot in February [2011]. I saw one medium-size grouper and that’s it. No whale sharks, no manta rays.”
guarding the coast Long, open beaches make the area near Bahía Balandra, above, a prime target for development, while this mangrove forest, right, protects the nearby city of La Paz from storm surges and hurricanes.
A
bout a hundred miles southeast of La Paz, near
the small coastal village of Cabo Pulmo, there are sharks, manta rays, sea turtles, and other species in numbers not seen anywhere else in the Sea of Cortez. That wasn’t the case 13 years ago. In 1999, Aburto Oropeza, working with several colleagues, surveyed the number of species in the waters off Cabo Pulmo. A 27-square-mile marine protected area had been established there four years earlier, and the researchers wanted to see if the area had started to recover. It hadn’t. The total species count hadn’t changed significantly since the park’s creation. Aburto Oropeza returned to Cabo Pulmo 10 years later for a follow-up study. This time, he was astonished by the changes. “It is incredible, the recovery there,” he says. “In only 10 years the increase in biomass has broken any of the records that we know of in the peer-reviewed literature. The total biomass has increased 460 percent. In terms of top predators, it has increased 1,000 percent in just 10 years. In the past four
years we’ve even seen tiger sharks and bull sharks return. Cabo Pulmo is now one of the best marine reserves in the world in terms of biomass of fish per hectare.” (Most of the world’s marine protected areas are far smaller than Cabo Pulmo; the average size is less than four square miles.) “What that example shows is that the basic productivity of the sea hasn’t been destroyed,” says Sánchez Ortiz. “Our guess is that if you give a place five or 10 years, it will come back.” The changes are due largely to the efforts of the villagers themselves, many of whom belong to a single extended family, the Castro Luceros. Fearing that their once bountiful fishing grounds were being destroyed by overfishing—and indeed that any fishing in the area might not be sustainable—the villagers began petitioning the federal government more than 20 years ago to establish a marine reserve at Cabo Pulmo. The government eventually granted their request in 1995, setting aside
businesses in the village, and their employees earn much more than the norm for Mexico. “We estimate that ecotourism in the Cabo Pulmo park has an economic benefit for the area of around $700,000 per year,” says Aburto Oropeza. What remains to be seen, however, is whether this remarkable success can be repeated elsewhere in the Sea of Cortez. Cabo Pulmo is distinctive in many ways. The village is small and socially cohesive, and close enough to two major cities—La Paz and Cabo San Lucas—to make ecotourism a viable alternative to fishing. In addition, it has the sea’s most spectacular coral growths. Few other fishing towns, however well-intentioned, will be able to accomplish much on their own. “We need policies that can ensure that people who now depend solely on fishing for a living will have some alternative,” says Miguel Cisneros, the former head of Mexico’s National Fisheries Institute. “In some places, there are no opportunities for young people. They go to kindergarten if they’re lucky, maybe elementary school. There is nothing else to do but fish. We need to provide the basic elements—education and alternative livelihoods. Some people don’t even know or understand that there are regulations in place by which they should abide.” Meanwhile, the future of Cabo Pulmo itself is uncertain. A Spanish company, Hansa Urbana, has plans to build a huge resort just north of Cabo Pulmo. The proposed development, Cabo Cortés, would comprise more than 13,000 homes, more than 30,000 hotel rooms, and a marina for nearly 500 yachts. Construction hasn’t yet started, but the Mexican government has tentatively approved large parts of the plan. A number of environmental groups, both local and international, including NRDC, have been trying to stop the development. “Basically the developers are proposing to build, in a 15-year period, a large city, another Cancún,” says Aburto Oropeza. “Losing this battle would mean more coastal development without any plans for coherent sustainability of the natural resources in the 35 percent of the park as a no-take zone, where all fishing is prohibited, area. Winning this battle would represent a change where successful and banning gill nets, trawling, and long lines in the remainder of the stories like Cabo Pulmo might happen in other areas.” For now, the view from Cabo Pulmo must look park. Many in the village thought the no-take zone visit onearth.org much as it did decades ago: a five-mile-long stretch was too small and decided on their own to enforce a for more of Octavio Aburto’s underwater photos from the Sea of Cortez. of beach bordered on the north and south by rocky no-take policy throughout the whole park. The villagonearth.org/sum12/photogallery points and surrounded by the peaks of the Sierra ers now regularly patrol the waters in their pangas to guard against poaching. Overnight, the hundred or so members of a de la Lagunas. It’s another blisteringly hot day, so with encouragecentury-old fishing community voluntarily gave up their way of life. The ment from various members of the Castro Lucero family, I rent some snorkeling gear and head into the water with José Cota Nieto, one of plan was to remake the village into an ecotourism destination. “For the first five years it was very hard for our families, because Sánchez Ortiz’s grad students. We explore the reefs for two dreamwe used to do commercial fishing,” says Paco Castro Lucero, as we like hours and see hundreds of fish: spectacular moorish idols, with stand near his family’s dive shop on the beach at Cabo Pulmo. “Not yellow and black stripes on their narrow flanks; puffer fish, their dark many people knew about this place, so only a few people came here blue bodies covered with white spots; trigger fish; leopard groupers; for snorkeling and diving.” There was no guarantee of success, but the seahorses. At one point I’m startled by an object the size of a small family’s patriarch, Don Jesús Castro, a former pearl diver who died in table that suddenly appears beside me—a sea turtle, a ridley sea turtle, 2005 at the age of 106, was a fervent conservationist who convinced I think. I surface to get Cota Nieto’s attention; I want him to see it. But when we dive again, the turtle has vanished. the community to persevere. As the reefs off Cabo Pulmo began to recover, word of the wonders to be seen there spread to Cabo San Lucas, the big resort city only Contributing editor Tim Folger has been writing about science for more than 60 miles away. Today there are at least five locally owned ecotourist 20 years and is the series editor of The Best American Science and Nature Writing. summer 2012
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in each shell a story Paleontologist Geerat Vermeij sees only with his fingertips, but traces eons in the minutest of details
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S U SAN
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F REIN K E L jim
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Wh e n
Geerat Vermeij was in fourth grade, his teacher and to draw richly on his other senses. “My world was not black and brought in some tropical seashells to show the hopeless,” he recalled with a characteristic lack of self-pity in his 1997 class. Vermeij, who is blind, loved shells; he already had a small col- autobiography, Privileged Hands. “It sparkled as it did before, but now lection he’d picked up from the beaches of his native Holland. But with sounds, odors, shapes, and textures.” those plain, fan-shaped cockles were rough huts compared with the Vermeij’s parents, amateur naturalists, helped sustain that sparkle. exquisitely adorned cathedrals that he now held in his hands. He ran They regularly took him and his older brother, Arie, for day trips in the his fingers over a Florida helmet shell, savoring its complex roof of countryside, supplying running commentary on the passing scenery, rounded knobs and regular rows of beaded ribs and its base as smooth pressing pinecones or flowers into his hands, and drawing braille picas glass. He marveled at the perfect cone shape of a sea-snail shell tures of objects, like mountains or trees, that were too big to hold. They and the sharp beads that spiraled from one end to the other. Vermeij nurtured his early interest in science. His mother read him articles on wondered at the differences. Why were these tropical creations so mollusks from academic journals, which he began subscribing to as a polished and ornate and the Dutch cold-water shells so chalky and dull? teenager. His brother helped him develop a scientific vocabulary by It was his first scientific question, and reading aloud every biological word in he’s been investigating the puzzles of the family’s massive dictionary while variability ever since. His answers have Geerat typed entries on his Perkins established him as one of the leading Brailler. (A similar heavy machine sits paleontologists in the United States. on his desk to this day.) As Vermeij, now 65 and a professor When Vermeij was 9, the family at the University of California, Davis, moved to New Jersey seeking better puts it, “I study the history of life.” He schooling for the blind, which they does it by questing across disciplines found seriously lacking in Holland. and time, by studying living mollusks The sacrifice wasn’t lost on Vermeij, and their fossil counterparts, and by who pushed hard to excel. He felt an filtering oceans of information through obligation to repay his parents’ faith his endlessly curious mind. “Great sciin him and to show up the skeptics entists are able to make connections who doubted that a blind person could between a number of fields. Gary is succeed as an academic scientist. New one of those guys,” says Greg Dietl, the Jersey’s Commission for the Blind, for vermeij spider-walks his collections director at the Paleontologiinstance, initially refused to give him cal Research Institution in Ithaca, New scholarship money to hire readers at fingers around a shell. he York. “He’s a synthesizer,” echoes Princeton, where he planned to study scratches a fingernail across biology; even after he had earned his Peter Roopnarine, a curator at the California Academy of Sciences. “And he’s the surface to feel for slight Ph.D. from Yale, officials at the Univergenerated a number of big ideas.” sity of Maryland insisted on hiring him variations that indicate a The big idea he’s best known for— on a trial basis before admitting him barely visible ridge or break. to the tenure track. Vermeij is quick the one that most likely earned him a MacArthur grant in 1992—is his “arms to deal with slights when they occur race” theory of evolution. By meticubut doesn’t dwell on them afterward. lously examining the architecture of fossil shells and the scars that tes- “Many blind people have a lot more trouble than I ever had. Maybe tify to long-ago battles, he showed that predators act as powerful agents they’re less arrogant,” he says, laughing. “Or a lot less self-assured.” of natural selection. As prehistoric crabs developed stronger jaws Some of that self-assurance may come from his unwavering fasand claws, for instance, snails evolved shells that provided stronger cination with science. He’s followed his curiosity across a range of defenses. Some paleontologists focus on grand physical events, such topics; he has published papers about plants, crabs, and other kinds as climate change, to explain how life evolved; Vermeij emphasizes of organisms. Still, nothing has captivated him the way mollusks have. how mundane ecological interactions turn the wheels of adaptation. He is endlessly awed by the diversity of forms that exists among the If this sounds like academic arcana, it is anything but. The environ- more than 100,000 living mollusk species. The fact that mollusks have mental crises we face today are nothing new, as experts like Vermeij survived for hundreds of millions of years, finding niches in almost recognize. Climate change, acidic seas, melting ice caps, invasive every environment, also makes them an ideal subject for someone species, mass extinctions—the world has seen it all before, and this interested in understanding the history of life. history is embedded in the fossil record. Though it may be a chronicle “They exemplify nearly every principle you can imagine in biology,” of the world that existed before humans arrived, Vermeij believes it he explains as we talk in his spacious but spartan campus office. Cardoffers valuable insights for saving the one we are so rapidly destroying. board trays heaped casually with bleached white clamshells 19 million Vermeij is tall and spare, with thinning dark hair, a short beard, and years old, gathered from a riverbank in Florida, sit atop one cabinet. a serious but warm manner. Born with a rare form of glaucoma, he suf- More cabinets lining two walls hold a research-grade collection of fered such poor vision and pain that doctors removed both of his eyes thousands of shells from all over the globe. His delight is evident as he when he was 3 years old. He quickly adapted, learning to echolocate rummages through various drawers to find specimens he thinks are 3 8 onearth
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interesting. “Here’s a cute little sand-dwelling thing,” he says, handing me a small brown shell with a ruffled edge. “This one is close to being one of the most beautiful things there are,” he continues, pulling out a two-inch specimen he identifies as a Euprotomus bulla from the coast of New Guinea. He found it, he says, in his typical way, just grubbing in the sand: “I keep my hands open, if you will, for whatever is there.” Its coloring is unextraordinary—pale tans and creams—but its surface is a tactile feast of rounded knobs and grooves and a little flange that protrudes from the base. “Isn’t that wonderful how the apex is corniced and the inside is so smooth?” he asks. The species evolved that particular architecture for self-defense, according to Vermeij’s theory: the thicker and knobbier the shell, the harder it is for a predator to grasp or break it, and the polished surface allows for smooth motion of the animal’s foot, which aids a fast getaway. It took someone seeing with his hands rather than his eyes to appreciate fully the significance of those features, says Jerry Harasewych, a curator of mollusks at the Smithsonian Institution. Watching Vermeij handle a shell is like watching a dog turn his nose to the wind—you know he’s absorbing a wealth of data that you are somehow missing. He spider-walks his fingers around it, taking in its geometry. He scratches a fingernail across the surface to feel for slight variations that indicate a barely visible ridge or break. He has identified new species based on minute variations in the shapes and contours of their shells and clearly enjoys taxonomic nit-picking. “I value that kind of detail, because it’s the details, ultimately, on which everything else is based,” he says.
illustration by bruce morser
Colleagues
all have stories about his sensory giftedness. “I was showing him some shells from the Caribbean and telling him what I thought they were,” recalls David Lindberg, a paleobiologist and curator at the University of California Museum of Paleontology. Vermeij questioned the identification, pointing out the presence of some small, fine ribs. “I hadn’t seen them, looking under the microscope,” Lindberg says. “He’d ‘seen’ them by touch.” One of Vermeij’s first research assistants, Jim Porter, remembers walking with him through a rainforest in Panama years ago. Vermeij decided to stop to take in the scenery. By the time Porter returned an hour later, Vermeij had identified all the bird territories within earshot. And then he asked, “What kind of flower is overhead?” Porter peered upward but couldn’t see any flowers until Vermeij pointed out that there was a cluster of bees swarming above them. Looking more closely Porter saw—100 feet above—the bloom of a canopy flower. Such close observation makes even a casual hike with Vermeij a slow-going affair. On a recent rainy day, I joined him and his wife, Edith, for a walk through a redwood grove north of San Francisco. Edith, a biologist, held his hand to guide him along the path and draw him to items of interest. “That’s my job,” she explained. “And to find snails—that’s my real job.” Vermeij eagerly laid his hands on whatever Edith brought to his attention: a shelf fungus jutting from a tanbark oak, a strangely coiled fiddlehead, a blooming trillium, a fat banana slug. Their working partnership has been going on for more than 40 years. The two met when they were both graduate students at Yale; Vermeij hired Edith to be one of his readers. They bonded as she read aloud to him Sir D’Arcy Thompson’s On Growth and Form, a two-volume discourse published
nrdc our ocean priorities
Tina Swanson Director of NRDC’s Science Center, based in San Francisco, and a marine biologist and expert on fisheries and water-resource management Geerat Vermeij is alarmed by new reports on the exceedingly high rate of ocean acidification. What’s in those reports, and why should he—and we—be troubled by the findings? Ocean acidification, which is caused by increased concentrations of carbon dioxide in the water, is the evil twin of global warming. Today our oceans are estimated to be 30 percent more acidic than they were before the Industrial Revolution. These new studies show that acidification in this century is happening much faster than it ever did in the past, going as far back as 300 million years. We know that many marine organisms such as corals, oysters, and important plankton species are unable to form their shells if seawater becomes too acidic. We also know that during previous acidification events there were mass species extinctions. When you put it all together, anyone who cares about or depends on the ocean—which is pretty much all of us—should be very concerned. Why is a policy of targeted conservation more beneficial than a campaign to try and save every endangered species? The first law of ecology holds that everything is connected to everything else, but in most places one or more keystone species are the linchpins for a stable, viable ecosystem. Whether you’re talking about a plant at the base of the food web or a top predator like the wolf, these species have a disproportionate effect on other species. A targeted conservation plan that satisfies the environmental needs of keystone species can have the collateral effect of providing benefits to many others. It’s more practical—not to mention easier to describe and to promote—than the alternative. Some scientists, such as Vermeij, take pains to avoid being thought of as advocates. You’ve made a different choice. Many scientists worry that their research will be considered biased if they express their opinion or advocate for how their findings should be applied. But science is a process for answering questions and figuring out how things work. Applying science to the solving of real-world problems is the same; you’re tackling questions like “What do we want to accomplish?” and “What does science tell us about how that can be done?” We may be scientists, but we’re also citizens with a responsibility to participate in our society. As long as we make it clear what problems we are addressing, we can strike an effective balance between science and advocacy.
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in 1917 on the mathematical and physical laws governing organic bitten by a moray eel in Polynesia, and stung countless times by sea form. They share a passion for natural science, though Vermeij’s is urchins. But the scariest encounters have been with humans, such much more single-minded. Edith says she knew she was marrying as the gun-toting soldiers in a remote village in Indonesia who briefly an obsessive when she moved into his apartment and found that the detained him and Edith on suspicion of being poachers. Vermeij knows five languages, but not Indonesian. They were released finally when a linen closet was filled with fossils and rocks. The two had hoped to find snails in the redwood grove but turned up crew member from their expedition ship arrived and explained in the only one tiny individual under a log, which Vermeij was able to identify local language that they were collecting shells for science, not profit. “Those things are not fun,” Vermeij says. “But you have to accept a instantly. The soil in the grove probably lacked sufficient calcium for creatures that need it to build their homes, he speculated. Indeed, certain amount of risk if you’re going to do anything interesting.” He though the woods offered plenty to appreciate, both seemed slightly depends on the experience of novelty to keep his curiosity sharp and disappointed by the absence of many animals or much understory. “This his mind alert. “Darwin would never have come up with the theory is a slow-motion world,” Vermeij observed. “It’s cold and unproductive.” of evolution if he’d stayed in England,” he observes. “The first thing He much prefers the lush extravagance of the tropics, where one you have to do as a scientist is to ask questions, to be puzzled by stuff, to not understand things.” can “sense nature at work,” he has If direct observation provides the said. Tropical ecosystems are busy nugget of an idea, the rest is built from economies, flush with the resources his extensive excursions into the scithat spur adaptation. Hence the answer entific literature. “He is staggeringly he developed to that original fourthwell read,” says the University of Chigrade question about the difference cago paleontologist David Jablonski. between tropical and cold-water shells: Indeed, Vermeij’s works are rich with tropical snails have more flamboyant references not only from the fields shells because they evolved in an of malacology and paleontology but energy-rich ecosystem teeming with also from mathematics, economics, predators, whereas snails in colder genetics, linguistics, and history. “I climates had neither the energy nor feel empty if I don’t read 10 papers a the predatory pressure to be anything week,” he says. Because practically no more than plain Janes. scientific journals are translated into The arms-race theory grew out of braille, an assistant (or Edith) reads a similar observation about the differvermeij fears that we the articles aloud while he types extenences among shells. After noticing sive notes. The resulting library—hunthat tropical snails in some locales had could be approaching dreds of sheaves of thick brown brailled better defenses than others—thicker, “a tipping point of a kind paper—contains about 18,000 books more armored shells with narrower apwe may not have seen for and articles. An enormous amount of ertures—Vermeij speculated that the information is also warehoused in his variations might be due to differences a very, very long time prodigious memory. He’s able to cite in the shell-crushing predators they in geologic history” references decades old and to summon encountered. He spent years studyup the most obscure taxonomic inforing live crabs and snails in the wild mation. “A grad student he worked with and in the lab and combing through museum collections of fossil specimens, painstakingly measuring said it’s like living with a search engine,” Edith says drily. Geologic time is demarcated by changes in the earth’s features. The claws and counting battle scars. He found that as the crabs’ claws grew bigger—spurred by their need to defend against their own slice of time we occupy is called the Holocene, an epoch that began predators—the snails’ armor toughened, exemplifying a process of some 12,000 years ago with the last retreat of the glaciers and the rise enemy-driven armament that radically changed the face of marine life of human civilization. But many paleontologists, Vermeij included, over hundreds of millions of years. Vermeij has since broadened his think a more appropriate name might be the Anthropocene, to reflect thinking, exploring how the economies of natural systems—the supply humanity’s heavy hand. We first left our imprint 10,000 to 11,000 years of nutrients, the demand for resources—shape processes of adaptation. ago when we began cultivating crops. But unquestionably, our most Investigating these processes is hands-on work. Vermeij has felt his profound impact began two and a half centuries ago when we started way across beaches, reefs, swamps, and forests around the world in spewing carbon dioxide into the air, warming the earth’s atmosphere. “Under normal circumstances,” Vermeij says, “I would have said search of living snails and their relics. He is unusual in his interest in both. But his knowledge of the living world is informed by his sense warming was a great thing in the long-term evolutionary run.” Warm of its history, and the hours spent knee-deep in living communities periods in the past inspired diversification, a proliferation of new species, and an explosion of living things competing and cooperating inform his insights into the past. “The man knows no fear,” says David Lindberg. “He’s reaching in new ways. But by the standards of geologic time, these are not under coral heads, under rocks, and into places where we’d never normal circumstances. Our presence and the myriad ways we are think of putting our hands.” He’s been speared by a stingray in Panama, changing the planet complicate efforts to draw on past precedent. 4 0 onearth
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patterns are sure to hold true. Changing temperatures put animals and plants on the move— which isn’t always a bad thing, Vermeij says. New arrivals often enrich ecosystems. He expects one of the most dramatic migrations will occur when melting Arctic sea ice reopens a passage from the north Pacific to the north Atlantic via the Bering Strait. When that seaway last opened some 3.5 million years ago, hundreds of mollusk species made their way through, most of them migrating from west to east. Some ecologists might be alarmed by what he and Peter Roopnarine, at the California Academy of Sciences, dubbed the “coming Arctic invasion” in a 2008 paper. But Vermeij is not one given to hand-wringing or polemics. Rather, he and his co-author ended the paper on a note of indefatigable curiosity, looking forward to the new wave of migrations as “a natural experiment that we should all anticipate with great interest.” Vermeij has had a harder time taking the measure of other impacts. For instance, there’s the problem of ocean acidification, typically attributed to increased concentrations of carbon dioxide. Until not long ago, he contended that the effects might not be as dire as some have predicted. The fossil record shows that there were periods when CO2 levels in the ocean were far higher than they are today, and yet a number of hard-shelled organisms survived and flourished. As recently as January, he said that he doubted the effects would be cataclysmic. By March, however, he had changed his mind after reading a report showing that the rate of acidification is “something like nine times higher than it ever has been.” Given that present-day oceans lack the buffers that may have helped mitigate the effects of acidification in the past—such as abundant populations of fish, which are sources of alkalinity—he now believes the process is happening much too quickly for the oceans to compensate. The oceans’ chemistry is “really out of balance, and it won’t be back for thousands of years,” he says. Vermeij has also grown increasingly concerned about the loss of biodiversity. For many years he remained relatively optimistic, reminding his students that “it takes a lot to extinguish a species.” Moreover, history shows that the biosphere can lose large numbers of species and still remain essentially intact, he says. Looking at past extinctions, he has found that “top-down” events affecting only animals—or “consumers,” as he calls them—may have been destructive, but the damage was limited. When the mastodons were hunted into extinction, for example, their loss didn’t take down many other species. “Bottom-up” events were a different matter, however. The great mass extinctions of geologic time were marked by the obliteration of the planet’s “producers”—the plants and phytoplankton on which all other life depends. The reason the dinosaurs died out 65 million years ago was that the dust raised by a huge asteroid strike shut down the process of photosynthesis. What worries Vermeij is that we are squeezing the biosphere from both ends and disrupting the critical feedback loops between nature’s producers and consumers. We’re destroying forests, coral reefs, sea grass meadows, and kelp beds: the natural productive systems at the biosphere’s foundation. And we’re eliminating consumers—most disastrously, top predators. He has long argued that predators play a critical role in regulating ecosystems and promoting diversity and stability. The fossil record is filled with examples of the same dynamic that occurred when wolves were driven out of Yellowstone, leading to an explosion in the deer and elk populations, which in turn threatened the park’s vegetation. The loss of predators leaves the
whole biosphere more vulnerable. “If another disturbance comes along, it wouldn’t take much to upset the system,” he says. What’s more, human activity is shrinking the opportunities organisms have relied on for eons to deal with change. We’ve carved up so many ecosystems into such small fragments that there are few escape routes or refuges left for threatened species. And we are such efficient predators, says Vermeij, that we may be disrupting normal processes of natural selection. Size and strength are no match for mile-long fishing lines and nets the size of football fields; our prey can’t follow the example of Vermeij’s snails and just build thicker, trickier shells to adapt. Their only defense is “staying out of our way as much as possible,” he says. He fears that we could be approaching “a tipping point of a kind we may not have seen for a very, very long time in geologic history. And that could be pretty damn catastrophic for us.” Vermeij is part of a consensus group of 21 experts who make the case for an impending tipping point in an upcoming article in the journal Nature. But are we doomed to tip? Vermeij can’t say for sure. Certainly he sees opportunities to lessen the odds. He argues for targeted conservation strategies. Rather than trying to save every last tree frog or butterfly, conservationists should emphasize the most important consumers and producers in ecosystems: forest trees and phytoplankton, reef-building corals and sponges, big mammals and—especially—apex predators. Mollusks are conspicuously absent from his list. Despite a lifetime’s devotion to creatures without backbones, he says, “I’m a vertebrate chauvinist. Vertebrates are evolutionarily important, and ecologically important.”
Vermeij
thinks the best long-term investment would be to protect large tracts of unexploited, productive habitat. Preserving whole ecosystems is one way to ensure the survival of whole populations. It’s also important to make sure that protected areas are ecologically productive. For instance, he points out that the Pacific Ocean marine sanctuaries established in 2009 cover an area that is relatively unproductive. “It’s not where populations are being regenerated,” he says. “It’s where they happen to survive. What you really need to do is safeguard regions that have an excess of individuals.” That would ensure that there is room for continuing adaptation. Indeed, he argues, conservation must go beyond simply protecting the complement of plants and animals we know today and focus on preserving their capacity to adapt in the face of change. For if paleontology teaches us anything, he says, it’s that change is inevitable. The question now is how we humans will adapt to coming environmental change. Our choices may be vastly broader than a threatened snail’s, but, according to Vermeij, the guiding principle remains much the same: redefining what it means to thrive. Whatever the prospects for Homo sapiens over geologic time, our well-being in historical time demands that we change our ways. We cannot continue to expand our economies, swell our population, and exploit the world’s resources at present-day rates. “Our only hope is a change in values,” he says. “Instead of wanting more material possessions, we need to find other ways of achieving happiness and satisfaction in life.” Those seem like odd words from a resolute non-activist. But Vermeij insists that his views are based on scientific evidence, not political beliefs. The fossil record shows, over and over again, that “to cope with radically new situations, you have to change your criteria of what it means to be successful,” he says. “That’s where we are. We need to do that.” He pauses and adds, “It will be more easily said than done.” summer 2012
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Royal Caribbean says it wants to clean up the notoriously dirty cruise ship industry. Can it be done? By michael behar
now on deck Jamie Sweeting is charged with greening Royal Caribbean’s Allure of the Seas, whose features, far right, include solar panels arrayed next to the smokestacks.
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Tia Magallon
t’s dawn in early December, and I’m standing barefoot
fuels. Today, virtually every cruise ship is powered by this cheap, gelatinous sludge, which presents the single biggest hurdle to an industry that wants to call itself sustainable. As long as Allure guzzles this stuff, she will leave a colossal environmental footprint, regardless of all her shipboard innovations. International regulators recently adopted a tough new set of emissions standards aimed at slashing smokestack pollution from ships. But the industry, citing cost, is fighting these regulations, because they will likely force it to phase out bunker fuel. A fierce political battle is now under way.
on a deserted beach that overlooks Falmouth, a colonial-era port, population 7,800, on Jamaica’s breezy northern coast, about 90 miles from the capital, Kingston. The air is deliciously cool and silky. Seabirds are pecking in the sand, scavenging for mole crabs at low tide. On the opposite side of the harbor, across shimmering blue water, there is a new $220 million port development for cruise ships. Royal Caribbean International and the Port Authority of Jamaica partnered to pay for its construction. Opened in March 2011, it was built to accommodate the largest passenger ships in the world, Allure of the Seas and Oasis of the Seas. Owned by Royal Caribbean and costing $1.4 billion apiece, they are sister ships— identical twins—five times the size of the Titanic, each carrying up to 6,300 passengers and 2,400 crew members. When I first spot her, Allure is a pearly flyspeck on the horizon. But steaming toward Falmouth at 22 knots puts her on top of me in minutes. The ship, a skyscraper in repose, soars 213 feet above the waterline. Her port side, closest to shore, is near enough that I can make out sleepy-eyed passengers clutching coffee mugs on stateroom balconies. They’re snapping photos,
JAMIE Sweeting, Royal Caribbean’s vice president of
too, with cameras flashing like glitter in the twilight. Allure typifies an emerging breed of larger and more lavish megaliners. It has two dozen restaurants, a shopping mall, four swimming pools (including one with a surfable wave), a 3-D movie theater, a casino, a sprawling fitness center and spa, a miniature nine-hole golf course, rock-climbing walls and zip lines, a comedy club, an ice-skating rink, volleyball and basketball courts, and nurseries for children, whose whereabouts can be pinpointed anywhere onboard with special “geotracking” bracelets. You can get your teeth whitened and your wrinkles Botoxed, and then catch a live symphony or a Broadway musical. Allure also boasts the world’s first “living park” at sea—a 21,000-square-foot open-air botanical esplanade with more than 12,000 plants and trees. To get a closer look at Allure, now docked, I stroll along Falmouth’s waterfront boardwalk. Her decks are brimming with passengers. There is a live spectacle under way on the stern. Theatrical music blares. Colored lights flash. And then acrobatic divers leap from elevated platforms through spouting fountains into a shallow oval pool. Although the music is loud, I can hear a guttural purr emanating from the ship’s engines. A dozen smokestacks clustered on the uppermost deck of this floating city are venting black plumes over the town. Despite all the posh trappings, Allure is surprisingly planet-friendly, flush with the greenest gadgetry on the high seas. However, her engines still burn bunker oil, also known as bunker fuel, the dirtiest of all fossil
sustainability to the next level,” he says. “I wasn’t interested, but they were relentless. I took the job because I believed I could do more for conservation working within the industry than outside it.” Some of his peers at Conservation International “thought I was Darth Vader, who had turned to the dark side,” he says. (He isn’t the first greencredentialed exec on the cruise line’s roster. William Reilly, former head of the Environmental Protection Agency and chairman emeritus of the World Wildlife Fund, joined Royal Caribbean’s board in 1998.) I meet Sweeting at Port Everglades, Allure’s home port, in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, to get a guided tour of the ship while she’s berthed between cruises. The amenities are sweeping and seductive, and after two hours onboard I admit to Sweeting that I’m reluctant to leave. In an interview with the Washington Post, Tor Olsen, captain of the sister ship, Oasis, said, “Our hope, of course, is that people don’t get off, because this ship itself is the destination.” The late writer David Foster Wallace once described a cruise as a “hypnotic sensuous collage.” That about sums it up. Midway through our tour, Sweeting and I stop for coffee in “Central Park,” Allure’s homage to the Manhattan landmark. Born in England, Sweeting, 40, has wavy blond hair and dark blue eyes. His looks are boyish—those of a surf bum—and his manner affable. He orders a cappuccino and then informs me that Allure is one of the greenest cruise ships ever built.
environmental stewardship, is a foot soldier in that war. But his alliances are conflicted. While he is committed to cleaning up Royal Caribbean’s fleet, he is also beholden to his employer, a public company that answers to shareholders who demand profitability. And Sweeting is not the one who will make the decisions about which fuels the company uses in the future. Cruise industry executive is an unlikely role for Sweeting, who spent more than 13 years promoting ecotourism for Conservation International. “In 2007 Royal Caribbean approached me. They wanted to take
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Raw sewage is perhaps his favorite topic—and one that directs us below deck, amidships, to Allure’s $5.5 million wastewater treatment plant. Royal Caribbean, which earns $7.5 billion in annual revenues, is budgeting $150 million to install similar systems throughout its 40-ship fleet. The wastewater system, large enough to cover a tennis court, collects effluent, transfers it to bioreactors with fecal-eating bacteria, and then filters and disinfects it. The outflow is sparkling clean, odorless, and allegedly potable. “I’ve had engineers that will drink it!” Sweeting says. Our next stop is a windowless, refrigerated hold where four crew members are plucking anything recyclable from heaps of garbage. “You are standing in the largest cold-storage trash facility at sea,” Sweeting announces. Bottles, cans, plastic, and paper are parceled into bins and delivered to a shoreside recycling service. Used cooking oil is stored and later sent to a biofuel producer. Sweeting says, “Of the waste that goes ashore from Allure, about 95 percent avoids landfills. We are recycling, repurposing, reusing, or donating. There isn’t a hotel chain in the world that can claim to be doing a lot of the things we’re doing.” In the engine room, Sweeting gives me earplugs. It’s impossible to talk above the roar, so he shouts, mouthing muffled words inches from my head. He gestures toward Allure’s six engines, which use a new, more efficient type of fuel injection. On most ships, engines turn a driveshaft to spin a propeller. Allure is markedly different. Her engines produce electricity, acting essentially as fuel-powered generators. This electricity not only runs various onboard systems, from critical equipment to cafés and casinos, but also drives the ship’s three azimuth
3-D computer simulations to determine the most efficient route, speed, and engine configuration for each leg of an itinerary. Once the ship is under way, specially tapered propellers and a slick, non-toxic hull coating reduce drag, while fore-and-aft sensors govern a trim system that makes real-time adjustments to Allure’s course. “The [software] can operate any combination of its six engines, making only the power the ship needs,” Sweeting says. “We are at a point where we are producing the optimal amount of energy for any given itinerary.” Royal Caribbean, with Celebrity and its other subsidiaries,
is the world’s second-largest cruise operator (after Carnival), valued at $6 billion. The conglomerate is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to shrink the environmental impact of its fleet. From what I’ve seen, much of what happens on board Allure is cleaner and greener than what occurs in a typical American city. “This ship has a 30 percent lower carbon footprint per person per day than a ship built about a dozen years ago,” Sweeting notes. But this shift is hardly an industry-wide trend. With the exception of Royal Caribbean and Norwegian Cruise Lines, most cruise companies only dabble in efforts to green their fleets. There are about 300 cruise ships of at least 1,000 gross tons worldwide, with 22 new vessels set to debut between now and 2016. And yet, only a few will boast bow-to-stern sustainability. Why? Truth is, most cruise lines don’t make meaningful investments in green technology because they don’t have to. The MARPOL (marine pollution) convention, adopted in 1973 by the 170 member nations
Sweeting says, “Of the waste that goes ashore from Allure, about 95 percent avoids landfills. We are recycling, repurposing, reusing, or donating. There isn’t a hotel chain in the world that can claim to be doing a lot of the things we’re doing.” thrusters. (Azimuths are small, self-contained electric motors that can rotate 360 degrees, eliminating the need for a rudder.) When Allure is cruising, her propellers face forward, pulling rather than pushing the ship through the water, saving about 20 percent in fuel. The ship further reduces its energy demands through waste-heat recovery, which leverages the high temperatures created by combustion in the engines to make hot water for the galleys, swimming pools, passenger cabins, and laundry. There’s also a $750,000 photovoltaic array spanning 21,000 square feet atop Allure’s 19th deck. It produces enough electricity to power the ship’s shopping district and central promenade. We take an elevator topside, to the passenger staterooms. All are outfitted with low-flow sinks and showers. “Our guests use about 20 percent less water on our ships than they would at home,” Sweeting tells me. LED and CFL bulbs are ubiquitous. Smart air conditioners make automatic adjustments based on the weather. We finish the tour on the bridge. The view is tremendous. Fort Lauderdale’s sugary beaches splay north and south. Inside, the navigation officer, in a crisp white uniform, is hunched over a computer console. He’s inputting data to software that performs something called voyage optimization. “There is a lot of pressure on the captain to get to a port on time—and human nature has often been to get there fast,” Sweeting explains. With voyage optimization, the captain no longer has to gun it for two days because there’s a headwind. Instead, the software considers variables such as wind and tides and currents, the ship’s displacement, and weather forecasts, and then performs 4 4 onearth
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of the International Maritime Organization (IMO) and covering all seagoing vessels, is lax at best. It permits ships to dump raw sewage into the open ocean. The same is true for gray water—the runoff from showers, galleys, and laundry. There is no limit on garbage tossed overboard as long as it’s diced into inch-size morsels, doesn’t include plastic, and is dumped three nautical miles from land. Bilge water gets a pass, too, provided its oil content falls below 15 parts per million. The United States, Canada, and the European Union have tougher domestic laws, but they’re enforced only in near-shore waters, which in the United States means just three miles from the coast. A ship can circumvent MARPOL by flying a flag of convenience—registering itself in a country with substandard regulation that is not a signatory to the convention. Once it’s in international waters, it can defile the environment with impunity. “They will tell you that they don’t dump. And they probably don’t, except when they do,” says Jackie Savitz, a scientist and senior campaign director for the not-for-profit advocacy group Oceana. “The hard question is, when does it happen? If you are not following them around all the time, you may never know.” Sweeting doesn’t deny that pollution from solid waste, raw sewage, and bilge oil was endemic in the 1990s, with companies fined millions of dollars for violations. But that’s not the case today, he maintains. “Did we at Royal Caribbean make mistakes in the past?” he says. “Yes. We plead guilty and have addressed that. We’re not perfect. But we are committed to being better tomorrow than we are today.”
According to Sweeting, “We will get to a point where your
average American will have less of an environmental footprint going on vacation on one of our ships than if they stayed home.” It’s all very impressive until the conversation turns to fuel. Allure can devour up to 7,230 gallons of bunker fuel an hour, or as much gasoline as your car would consume if left idling for an entire year. Burning this cheap by-product of petroleum refining releases nitrogen oxides, sulfur oxides (SOx), and carbon dioxide. Sulfur oxides, and the particulate matter that accompanies them, can lead to emphysema, bronchitis, heart disease, and cancer. It takes just 15 motoring cruise ships to expel the same amount of SOx that every car in the world would emit if running at once. When ships idle in port to generate electricity, they rain poison onto anyone in the vicinity. SOx emissions from cruise ships may lead to 30,000 deaths a year worldwide, according to the EPA and a 2007 report from the College of Marine and Earth Studies at the University of Delaware, published in the journal Environmental Science & Technology. IMO member nations recently ratified new rules that will oblige ships to either install smokestack scrubbers or burn low-sulfur alternatives to bunker fuel, specifically marine diesel. A global mandate
last tree standing These former red mangrove wetlands in Falmouth,
illustration by bruce morser
Jamaica, will be the site of a new market and a sewage treatment plant.
will commence in 2020. Until then, the IMO has designated “emission control areas” close to densely populated coastal communities. These include the coastal waters of North America, parts of the Caribbean, and the North and Baltic seas. Within these areas, SOx restrictions are more stringent than those stipulated for open-ocean cruising. In August, the EPA will begin enforcing the new pollution standards for all ships operating within 200 nautical miles of the U.S. coastline. Environment Canada will do the same for its coasts. In 2014, the mandate will be extended to waters encircling Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands—prime cruising territory. (See “Cleaner Oceans,” right.) Cruise operators are fighting the impending regulations. Bunker fuel goes for about $700 a ton. Marine diesel is a far cleaner alternative, and nearly every cruise ship could burn it with only minor adjustments to its engines. But it costs twice as much. Cruise lines claim they’d go bankrupt if they were compelled to use it.
nrdc cleaner oceans
Rich Kassel Senior attorney in NRDC’s New York office and an expert on transportation fuels and emissions issues
What do you think of the cruise ship industry’s claim that it can’t afford to use cleaner marine fuel? Whenever industry has to change what it’s been doing for years, we hear complaints about the cost. But as we’ve seen many times before, spending a bit more on cleaner fuels is a great investment in public health. According to the Environmental Protection Agency, every dollar spent to reduce pollution from ships will create as much as $34 in health benefits. Cleaner ships will translate into fewer asthma emergencies, heart attacks, and lung ailments, especially among children and the elderly. And what’s the argument for using dirty fuels when you’re visiting Alaska, the Caribbean, Hawaii, or other popular cruise destinations? People want to see blue skies, not plumes of black smoke. Most of the large vessels at American ports are container ships, not cruise ships. What steps are being taken to clean up these vessels? In 2010 the International Maritime Organization adopted a U.S.-Canadian proposal to create an Emission Control Area (ECA) that will stretch 200 nautical miles from most of our coastline. Starting this summer, ships will use fuels with a much lower sulfur content, immediately reducing sulfur levels by one-third. By switching to these cleaner fuels and installing pollution-cutting devices, this program will avoid 14,000 premature deaths a year in the United States and save up to $110 billion in health costs by 2020. Unlike the cruise ship industry, the container ship industry has been a supporter of the ECA program and is going full steam ahead to its complete and timely implementation. It’s great that the United States is making progress on cleaning up container ships. Is there any movement in that direction in other countries? Some northern European ports will adopt similar ECA requirements in 2015. This means that many ships leaving Hong Kong, the Chinese city of Shenzhen, and other large Asian ports for U.S. and European markets will be carrying both high- and low-sulfur fuels. We’d love to see the Asian ports adopt ECAs, too, because that would protect people on both ends of the world’s supply chains. Given that pollution levels in coastal cities in Asia dwarf those in the United States, this would be a great step forward.
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floating city Passengers on Allure can ride a zip line over “Central Park� and sip a latte at the first ever shipborne Starbucks.
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Mega-liners, typically defined as ships larger than 100,000 gross tons, now account for about one-seventh of the global cruise ship fleet, or 42 vessels
One response has been a threat simply to sail outside of emissioncontrol areas. The corporate environmental compliance officer at Norwegian Cruise Lines, Captain Minas Myrtidis, tells me, “Our industry has assets that can move [and] it’s something we will take into consideration. We are a business and we have to be able to make a profit.” The Cruise Lines International Association, the industry’s largest advocacy group, is trying to broker a compromise that is strongly supported by Royal Caribbean. It proposes that ships be permitted to burn bunker fuel on certain portions of their routes so long as average emissions for the entire journey meet IMO limits. “When we’re 200 miles out in the ocean, I don’t think our emissions are affecting anybody,” says Myrtidis. That’s ludicrous. Sure, coastal dwellers won’t be inhaling SOx fallout. But other emissions—carbon dioxide and nitrogen oxides—harm the planet no matter where they’re discharged. And according to Marcie Keever, a project director at Friends of the Earth,“Each cruise ship contributes on average five times the amount of CO2 as a container ship.” Policing how fast cruise ships travel could offer a solution. Peter Lockley, an editor at Fathom, a U.K.-based research and consulting firm to the maritime industry, suggests “slow steaming,” which, he says, “is the easiest way to make deep emissions cuts, up to 30 percent.” But cruise lines aren’t keen on the idea, maintaining that because bunker fuel is viscous and must be kept very hot to remain fluid, operating at low speeds would allow it to solidify and gum up engines. Not so, argues Jacob Sterling, head of climate and environment at Maersk, the world’s largest container ship operator. When Maersk tested slow steaming on 110 of its vessels, dropping speeds from the usual 24 knots to between 12 and 16 knots, it discovered an easy fix to the viscosity problem. “Every 24 hours, you speed up briefly to clean out the system,” he says. Now the company has implemented slow steaming on at least three-quarters of its fleet, cutting bunker fuel consumption by about 10 percent and saving about $300 million a year. It’s not unheard-of for a slow-steaming ship to achieve a 20 percent reduction in CO2 and to decrease pollution from nitrogen and sulfur oxides by the same amount. Nevertheless, cruise lines reject slow steaming because they say it would disrupt the standard dawn-arrival, dusk-departure schedule, with ships reaching ports of call at odd hours of the day or night. So what other ways are there to mitigate emissions? Royal Caribbean has installed smokeless gas-turbine engines, which can slash emissions by more than 90 percent, on eight of its ships. But because these can burn only costly marine diesel, the company typically limits their installation to vessels that operate in places where low-sulfur emissions are already mandatory, such as Alaska’s Inside Passage. Royal Caribbean is also testing smokestack scrubbers on two of its smaller ships. However, “I have not seen any scrubber that is reliable,” says Gildas Bonamy, an engineer and head of environmental strategy at STX Europe, the world’s fourth-largest shipbuilder, based in Oslo. Last year Maersk conducted a trial with rapeseed-based biofuel. But biofuels are outrageously expensive. “The 30 tons on our container ship costs around $3 million,” notes Sterling. For the same quantity of bunker fuel, you’d pay about $23,000. There are engines that can burn liquefied natural gas. At the moment, however, even the world’s largest cruise ships cannot carry enough of it to fuel a typical weeklong voyage. And refilling en route isn’t doable, either. “The availability of liquefied natural gas in ports is not there,” Bonamy says. 4 8 onearth
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Back in Jamaica, it’s hard to escape the other impediment to the
greening of the cruise ship industry. Mega-liners—typically defined as ships larger than 100,000 gross tons—now account for about oneseventh of the global cruise fleet, or 42 vessels. Most cruise ships currently under construction are of similar size. And these monster ships require deeper and larger ports. In Falmouth, to accommodate Allure and Oasis, wrecking crews had to smash a quarter-mile-wide opening in an offshore barrier reef. They dredged coral, both living and dead, as well as the rock substrate, and trucked it inland to a two-square-mile dump site—a clear-cut area on the outskirts of town that was once a thriving red mangrove swamp. Now all that’s left is 35 million cubic feet of pulverized coral and rubble. When I visit the site with Roland Haye, a Jamaican environmental activist, he tells me, “As a boy, I used to play Tarzan here and see crocodile. It was a winter home for great heron and swan.” He points out broken conch shells, dismembered starfish, bits of sea sponge, and severed lobes of brain coral.
collateral damage Roland Haye of the Trelawny Environmental Protection Association stands atop rubble dredged from Falmouth’s coral reef.
Royal Caribbean and the port authority worked with Jamaica’s National Environment and Planning Agency (NEPA) and others in an attempt to save the reef. In what was billed as the largest coral relocation in history, scuba divers pried loose some 145,000 chunks of living coral and transplanted them to “donor sites” nearby. But Diana McCaulay, chief executive officer for the Jamaica Environment Trust (JET), who monitored the 18-month project, deemed it a mismanaged folly. She told me that divers used the wrong type of adhesive to affix the transplanted coral. At times, dredging began before coral was removed, choking the reef with silt and making it impossible for divers to work. Some of the dead coral became backfill foundation for the new pier, even though it could still have provided habitat for a range of organisms. Haye tells me that moving part of the reef to make room for larger ships removed a natural barrier that had protected the coastal highway from heavy surf. Now waves crash directly onto the blacktop, snarling traffic and leaving this part of the coast defenseless when the next hurricane barrels ashore. Royal Caribbean isn’t entirely to blame. Local
statutes are sometimes substandard, and NEPA doesn’t always have the muscle or money for enforcement. Sweeting says that Royal Caribbean will generally follow EPA rules when operating in a country with inadequate environmental policies and, moreover, that it will “go above and beyond compliance” with local laws. But this practice generally applies only to how the cruise line behaves offshore. In the case of Falmouth, it was the Port Authority of Jamaica that directed the pier construction. There is an economic toll as well. After watching the 1,187-foot-long Allure maneuver into its berth, its 20-foot-tall propellers churning up the seabed and turning pellucid water into pale mud, I count perhaps a couple of hundred disembarking passengers trickling into the pier complex. Its perimeter fence encloses a modern shopping plaza whose glitzy retailers, such as Bijoux and Philip Stein, pay rent to Royal Caribbean. Most of the passengers wander amid these shops; fewer exit the gates into old-town Falmouth. Local artisans, whose craft market is across the street, are not allowed inside to sell their wares. This makes perfect sense if you’re Royal Caribbean. Every penny a passenger spends in Jamaica is a penny less earned by the cruise line. And Falmouth isn’t an aberration. The same thing is happening at other cruise-ship stopovers in the Caribbean—and even in Charleston, South Carolina. When Royal Caribbean and the Port Authority of Jamaica held public meetings in Falmouth to unveil their plan for the new port, the audience was mostly receptive. Townsfolk were told that disembarking passengers would enrich the local economy. They weren’t told that at
Falmouth’s economy. For tourists who vacation on the island, it’s five times that amount—at least 35 cents per dollar. Today, with Allure in port, the town is only a little busier than when the cruise docks are empty. Sweeting believes that will change. “We’re still very early in the Falmouth story,” he says. “Now that the tourists are there, entrepreneurs are realizing there are real opportunities to develop attractions and amenities, and they’re starting to invest. ” Royal Caribbean recently hosted a workshop on Oasis with experts in sustainable tourism. From the gathering emerged a permanent working group of the Global Sustainable Tourism Council, a body of U.N. agencies, tourism boards, travel companies, and tour operators. “We put forth criteria, now out for public review, to have a common international standard of what destination stewardship should look like,” Sweeting tells me. “Having a destination be sustainable not only in terms of economics, but in terms of social and environmental well-being, is essential to our business. We’ve got to have destinations where locals benefit from tourism. Everyone knows what it’s like to go to a place where communities feel disenfranchised. You get the impression that they don’t want you there, and then you don’t want to go back. For our business, we need guests to have a fantastic time.” At sunset on my penultimate evening in Jamaica, I sit on the
top steps of the Falmouth courthouse with Esther Figueroa to watch the darkening crimson sky. Figueroa is a Kingston-born filmmaker
Townsfolk were told that disembarking passengers would enrich the local economy. They weren’t told that at least 20 percent of passengers, steeped in amenity bliss, would prefer to remain aboard or stray only as far as the gated shopping complex. least 20 percent of passengers, steeped in amenity bliss, would prefer to remain aboard or stray only as far as the gated shopping complex, where storefronts would be done up in colonial facades designed to replicate Falmouth. Those wishing to avoid the bustle and grit that engulfs a real port city can now get the “Falmouth Experience” instead. One afternoon, while a Carnival ship is docked, I try to weasel my way inside, but a security guard at the gate turns me away. At Royal Caribbean’s small Falmouth branch office, a staffer agrees to let me peruse the pier. But I’m not left alone for long. William Tatham, the Port Authority’s vice president of cruise shipping and marina operations, taps me on the shoulder before introducing himself. He takes me to a newer section of the pier, where construction crews are busy with expansion. “We’re going to build an artisan’s village, a coffee warehouse, and a rum experience where people can see how rum is made,” says Tatham, who then adds some historical context. “This port was where more slaves were brought into Jamaica than any other.” When I walk through the old craft market across from the pier terminal, those I speak with are disgruntled and angry. Haye had told me, “This is the last port of call for most ships, so when tourists get here, they don’t have much to spend.” What’s left is either frittered away in the pier shops, which are on real estate owned by Royal Caribbean, or shelled out for pre-booked land-based tours, whose operators share revenues with the cruise lines. Royal Caribbean says that 30 percent of disembarking passengers visit Falmouth; another 40 percent leapfrog the town to take prepaid excursions elsewhere in Jamaica. Just seven cents of every dollar a cruise passenger spends is retained in
and activist who co-wrote, co-produced (with JET’s McCaulay), and directed the 2009 documentary Jamaica for Sale. The film tracks the Falmouth port construction through its early stages, when demolition crews began removing the reef. Now she is back in Falmouth to film a series of mini-exposés that she’s been uploading to YouTube. But officials won’t let her inside the port complex, so she’s shooting from our vantage atop the courthouse steps. Figueroa doesn’t have many good things to say about the port. “This type of development excludes and disenfranchises the majority of Jamaicans,” she says. “It destroys anything indigenous and makes us beggars and cargo cultists, worshipping a ship.” And yet the cruise ship industry isn’t going away. In 2012, at least 20 million people will take a cruise, more than double the number who did so just eight years ago. Sweeting insists it will be impossible to sustain that kind of explosive growth if Royal Caribbean leaves a trail of mindless environmental destruction in its wake. “We need to ensure that our destinations are as thriving and vibrant and intact 10 to 20 years from now as they are today,” he tells me. “I’m not a particularly religious man, but there is one parable in the Bible that is applicable: first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s. We think we are doing a good job in a lot of areas, but we still have a ways to go. So if you’re an environmentalist and you’ve got issues with us, then bring it on.” OnEarth contributing editor Michael Behar writes about adventure travel, the environment, and innovations in science and technology. He lives in Boulder, Colorado. SUMMER 2012
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HOw cool is that? In a deep, icy Norwegian fjord, an abandoned mine may help solve the energy problems of the Internet
by dav i d b i e l l o p h o t o g r a p h s by m a r c u s b l e a s da l e
deep storage A paved underground road called the Avenue gives access to rock chambers, or “streets,� that will house server equipment.
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Cold and bountiful The 66-mile-long Nordfjord has been a fishing center since pre-Viking times.
D
eep within a frozen mountainside, Norwegian
engineers are hoping to create a fortress for data. Chilled by seawater drawn from the Nordfjord, about 230 miles northwest of Oslo, and bathed in ambient temperatures that remain at a constant 46 degrees Fahrenheit year-round, thousands of the giant computers that keep the Internet humming, each throwing off large amounts of heat, could remain permanently cool in the disused Lefdal mine, near the town of Måløy. Norway has a reputation as a world leader in clean energy, and tiny Måløy, with a population of only 3,000, takes pride in its own recent emergence as a hub of green-tech development. The town is a pioneer in both onshore and offshore wind energy. One local company is building a power plant that will run on domestic and industrial waste and another that uses forest biomass. Other companies specialize in sustainable fisheries, wave-power technology, and energy-efficient windows and building materials. But the most ambitious of all these projects is the Lefdal mine, which its designers, LocalHost, promise will be the largest and greenest server farm in the world. The Lefdal mine once produced olivine—an olive-green mineral that is used in the aluminum and steel industries and also supplies ballast for the foundations of offshore wind farms. (Perhaps the mineral’s most intriguing trick is its ability to soak up carbon dioxide from the air and bind it into rock.) The facility is vast. Lying next to the long, deep Nordfjord, it consists of five levels (with the potential to expand to 14), sprawling over some 1.3 million square feet of “white space” that can be used for storage, connected by a paved road that descends in a spiral 5 2 onearth
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through tunnels 45 feet wide and almost 30 feet high. Just one of those five levels, says Mats Andersson, the chief marketing officer for the data center project, “could host all the servers in Norway.” The ethereal world of the Web has a very real physical presence. Behind every Google search, Facebook update, or Twitter tweet lies a gigantic computing infrastructure, at the heart of which sit massive server farms that collectively account for some 230 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions annually—more than emitted by the entire country of Argentina. Air-conditioning can consume as much as half the total power that digital giants like Google, Facebook, Twitter, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and IBM need to run their huge server facilities, and these are growing rapidly. One solution is to move to a place that’s already cold. Naturally cold air and, better yet, cold water, can result in significant energy savings. Locations for server farms are being explored across the far north, from Alaska to Iceland. Google is operating a site in the Finnish town of Hamina. Facebook is building a server farm in Luleå, Sweden, just south of the Arctic Circle. Lefdal, which offers an abundance of clean, renewable energy from nearby hydroelectric dams and wind farms, as well as a unique cooling system that will pump icy cold water from about 650 feet below sea level, is expecting its first tenant to be IBM Norway. Andersson says that construction of the Lefdal data center will begin this fall and that “we will be in operation before summer 2013.” Still, not all the world’s computing needs can find a home in the Arctic (or Antarctic), and that means other solutions will also be
safe as houses The solid rock walls of the Lefdal mine offer excellent protection from natural disasters.
needed. In fact, companies that make the equipment for these server farms, such as Intel, have been focusing on a shift to operating at higher temperatures, so their data centers won’t have to migrate to frigid realms. “It’s not all about cooling,” notes Jonathan Koomey of Stanford University, who analyzes the industry. “You can also redesign servers to take hotter temperatures or find different ways to deliver the same computing service.” Already, Intel’s most modern server equipment can operate at temperatures above 77 degrees Fahrenheit. “There is no performance degradation,” says Intel’s chief architect for data centers and cloud infrastructure, Charles Rego, noting that his company’s components have been designed to withstand temperatures as high as 95 degrees. “For every degree Celsius [1.8 degrees Fahrenheit] you move up, it’s a 4 to 5 percent energy savings on cooling.” That translates into millions of dollars in lowered costs for a large server farm. One of Facebook’s latest server farms, in Prineville, Oregon, cools its data center entirely with the surrounding air. An Intel experiment in New Mexico showed that air from outside could be used to keep a 900-server facility operating even on a 91-degree day. And Intel has designed new layouts for its motherboards—the etched wafers that house the elements of the computing system—so that one processor does not heat up another, allowing more efficient cooling. As a result, the servers of today are typically at least five times more energy efficient than those of just five years ago. Intel holds out hopes for even higher temperature operation, above 104 degrees Fahrenheit. “It gets rid of water use,” Rego explains. “Water consumption at these
server farms is the hidden dragon,” particularly, he adds, as parts of the globe face water shortages. Right now, data centers go through roughly 80 billion gallons of water annually for cooling, according to Intel—much of which is not recycled. That isn’t a problem for a facility like Lefdal, which returns the warmed water straight to Nordfjord. There seems to be no end to the demand for additional computing resources. Keeping this escalating demand from sucking up ever more energy will be vital, and the present trend toward greater efficiency needs to continue. Koomey’s research is encouraging, suggesting that the power needed to perform a given task will decrease a hundredfold every decade. In addition, among other common-sense solutions, some companies now throttle back the number of servers in operation when there is little demand, rather than running them all the time. Others are redesigning their servers so they use less energy when they are not actively processing data. Of course, even the most energy-efficient computer draws more power the more processing it has to do. That makes software a big—though hidden—part of the problem. Some unwieldy computer programs still contain instructions written in the 1950s, so updating software for energy efficiency represents another opportunity. In the meantime, however, a defunct mine in Norway can keep a data center nice and cool. And there’s something very fitting in the fact that a mine containing a mineral capable of soaking up CO2 should now be used to house a server farm that will emit less CO2 in the first place. David Biello is an associate editor at Scientific American. summer 2012
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breasts A Natural and Unnatural History by florence williams Norton, 352 pp., $25.95
anatomy lessons The modern world lays siege to a miracle of evolutionary engineering
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by elizabeth kolbert
n 2005, Florence Williams was a working, not-so-young mother with two little
kids, Annabel and Ben. Having imbibed, as it were, the message “Breast Is Best,” Williams was still nursing Annabel, then a year old, which meant that she was also carefully monitoring her own intake—lots of vitamins and organic produce, minimal alcohol and caffeine. But even as Williams was trying to safeguard Annabel, she kept coming across headlines that made her anxious. One in 17 women had enough mercury in her blood to risk causing learning disabilities in her children. The Environmental Protection Agency expressed concern that even low-level exposure to perfluorooctanoic acid, used in the manufacture of Teflon, could potentially lead to developmental problems. Flame retardants known as PBDEs, which were known to cause brain damage in rats, were increasingly showing up in human breast milk. “Had I been wrong to be so smug about the superiority of breast-feeding?” Williams wondered. As a journalist, Williams realized that her own experience was a story. (She is a contributing editor at Outside magazine and also a contributor to OnEarth.) She decided to have her breast milk analyzed and sent vials of frozen milk off to Germany. While she awaited the results, she learned more: in Sweden, levels of PBDEs in breast milk had been doubling every five years since the early 1970s. In American
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women, these levels are now 10 to 100 times higher than in women in Europe or Japan. PBDEs are ever ywhere: in chicken, pork, and dairy products; in wild birds; in soil sediments; in human fetal tissue. Williams’s test results eventually came back right around normal for an American, which is to say elevated. Presumably her levels had been even higher before she nursed her two kids, to whom she might have unwittingly bequeathed about half of her body’s accumulated PBDEs. Williams wrote up her findings for the New York Times Magazine, which ran the piece under the anxiety-producing headline “Toxic Breast Milk?” Though her daughter soon after ward stopped nursing, Williams’s interest in breastfeeding—and breasts more generally—persisted. The result is Breasts: A Natural and Unnatural History, a lively and informative look at the most-ogled but in many ways least understood par t of the human body. By turns funny and scary, Breasts takes up issues that concern all of us in the most intimate possible ways, whether or not we have a pair of our own. The ability to nurse is, of course, a defining characteristic of mammals, one that female humans share with distaff monkeys, rodents, and tenrecs. But only humans have breasts as we know them—“pleasant orbs,” as Williams puts it, that stick around (and also out) “regardless of our reproductive status.” The first question Williams takes up is: Why? The quest takes her all the way to New Zealand, where she interviews Alan and
ALFREDO DAGLI ORTI/THE ART ARCHIVE AT ART RESOURCE, NY
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wordsimagesideas
Barnaby Dixson, a father-and-son academic team whose research consists of showing men pictures of naked women. The Dixsons belong to what might be called the “how to marry a caveman” school. They believe that human breasts evolved to signal sexual fitness. Opposed to them are researchers like the anthropologist Frances Mascia-Lees, of Rutgers University, who argue that human breasts serve the far less titillating purpose of energy storage. According to Mascia-Lees, breasts are merely the “by-products of fat deposition.” Williams never resolves the dispute between the two groups. This isn’t a knock on her reporting; at this point at least, the answer isn’t known. The same holds true for a lot of other questions about breasts. As Williams points out, “there have been, and continue to be, big gaps in our knowledge about how these organs work.” Take, for instance, the question of puberty. In the Western world, girls seem to be developing breasts earlier and earlier. A 1997 study put the average age at 10 years for white girls and 8.9 for African-Americans. In 1999 the official age for “precocious puberty” was revised down, from 8 years to 7 for white girls and from 7 to 6 for African-Americans. Meanwhile, a Danish study conducted in 2006 found that girls were budding breasts a full 12 months earlier than they had just 15 years before. The trend is not just disconcerting but also dangerous: early puberty has been shown to increase the risk of breast cancer. So what’s going on here? One theory blames fat; as teens and preteens have put on weight, the age of puberty has advanced. But weight gain, it turns out, can’t fully explain the change. Something else must be going on as well. Girls these days, and of course boys as well, are exposed to a fantastic array of hormone-disrupting chemicals. These include, in addition to PBDEs, phthalates, bisphenol A,
organochlorine pesticides, and in- some of the members of the dustrial solvents. Some of these cluster. Michael Partain, who chemicals, ironically enough, are was conceived and born at Camp found in personal care products, Lejeune, found out that he had such as shampoos and toothpaste. breast cancer at age 39. He sus“One lesson,” Williams writes, “is pects in utero exposure. “It’s that the ‘cleaner’ you are—at least every woman’s worst nightmare, by the standards of consumer that something they can do when culture—the more contaminated they’re pregnant can affect their you are.” But no one knows which, unborn child,” he says. “I saw it in if any, of the compounds is the my mother’s eyes, the most heartculprit, or how exactly it might be breaking look, despair.” affecting the age of puberty. “What It is hoped that research on the is scary is that we don’t have any cluster will finally demonstrate idea what the mechanism is,” a the links between certain types of Danish scientist tells Williams. breast cancer and certain classes Breasts makes several forays of chemicals, links that so far have into what might be called the remained elusive. “From an acacultural anthropology of the demic point of view, it’s good,” bust. One chapter, for instance, one researcher observes. “For explores the appeal of the boob the men involved, it’s terrible.” Williams is a graceful writer, job, a research effort that takes Williams to the offices of Michael and the story she has to tell is an Ciaravino, a plastic surgeon in important one. That, in the end, Houston who performs some 800 many of the questions she raises breast augmentation operations a can’t be answered turns out, in year. But the book’s major focus itself, to be revelatory. Over and is on health, and though Breasts over again, we’ve released chemiis obviously catchier than Can- cals into our air, water, and food cers of the Breast, the latter title supply—DDT, PCBs, CFCs— speaks to the focus of much of only to learn that we’ve made a Williams’s book. In the United terrible mistake. You might think States, she points out, the inci- we’d wise up and demand rigordence of breast cancer has been ous testing of new compounds rising by between 1 percent and before they enter general use. 2 percent a year for at least half But 50 years after the publicaa century. In the year 1940, the tion of Rachel Carson’s Silent number of women diagnosed with Spring, Williams notes, “In the the disease was 59 out of 100,000; United States, every chemical is today it’s more than double that. assumed safe until proved guilty.” Among men, too, the incidence The untested compounds build is rising. As it happens, Camp up in our own bodies, and then Lejeune, a we pass them visit onearth.org Marine Corps on to our kids. for a survivor’s take on breast base in North Of course, no cancer and environmental chemicals. onearth.org/12sum/cancer Carolina, has mother wants produced the to harm her largest cluster of male breast children, which is why parents cancer suf ferers ever identi- can be such a potent force for fied. The cluster seems to be change. “When breast milk connected to the camp’s water speaks, people listen,” one resupply, which for many years searcher tells Williams. Let’s was heavily contaminated with hope they are listening to Breasts. benzene, trichloroethylene, and perchloroethylene—all known Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer at the or probable human carcinogens. New Yorker and author of Field Notes In one particularly moving From a Catastrophe (Bloomsbury). She chapter, Williams inter views is writing a book about extinction.
straphanger Saving Our Cities and Ourselves From the Automobile BY Taras grescoe Times Books, 336 pp., $25
THERE ARE PLENTY OF good reasons to wish that America’s unique combination of vast resources, technical ingenuity, and can-do spirit would result in a transportation revolution of the sort that has already taken place in other cities around the world: one that greatly de-emphasizes the automobile and raises the profile of subways, light rail, buses, commuter trains, bicycles, or just plain walking. It would enormously reduce global carbon emissions. It would be more economical. And Americans would be a lot healthier were they to spend just a little less time in their cars and more time perambulating. Taras Grescoe, a Canadian journalist who has traveled all over the world in search of such models, has another good reason. Good public transportation actually makes communities stronger, not only by bringing individuals together (both literally and politically) but by encouraging the kinds of urban planning and infrastructural development that foster the well-being of “citizens”—a term whose ancient and honorable connotations are etymologically linked, after all, to the word city, from which it derives. “[B]y investing in development
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that includes well-conceived transit,” he writes in the introduction to Straphanger, his round-the-world tour of transit systems, “we can create more sustainable and, crucially, more civil communities.” Many of the cities that Grescoe visits are associated to one degree or another with an iconic mode of transit. In New York, as well as limning the progress of the longawaited Second Avenue subway line, he contemplates various urban planning bullets dodged by New Yorkers, all of which seemed to issue from the gun of the trigger-happy Robert Moses. The legendary developer, who may have done more than any other individual to shape the physical outline of modern-day New York, not only built the bridges and tunnels on which millions of grateful New Yorkers depend; he also blithely destroyed entire neighborhoods by slicing through them, routinely sacrificing civic lambs at the altars of the car and the expressway. “Moses’s blind spot was community, the little people who never showed up on his models and plans,” writes Grescoe, adding that without the energies of enlightened citizen-agitators like Jane Jacobs, Moses and his likeminded auto worshippers might well have turned Manhattan into a maze of crisscrossing highways. Los Angeles and Phoenix, by comparison, are presented as carreliant cities that have failed to realize their full potential. In the case of Los Angeles, Grescoe writes, a panoply of transportation options can’t make up for the fact that atomized populations, separated by vast gulfs of wealth and class, can’t agree on how to integrate these into a coherent, efficient system. The result is a bureaucratic stalemate and a dispiritingly poor experience for the carless. (“A domestic worker from East L. A. who cleans 5 6 onearth
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house in Beverly Hills faces a twohour ride to work by bus, light rail, subway, and then bus again,” he notes. “When using public transport means doubling your travel time and suffering through interminable transfers, only the desperate will ride it.”) Phoenix, in Grescoe’s view, is nearly a lost cause, a sun-baked dystopia where actual vultures lurk atop the swing sets of empty playgrounds in barren, foreclosed-upon neighborhoods: an inevitable result of “urban planning” that is little more than a subsidized mandate for automobile-enabled sprawl. As he puts it, “If a healthy city grows like an avocado, nurtured by a solid pit of commerce and culture, Phoenix is an onion: remove the successive layers of subdivisions, and there is nothing—apart from an overpriced stadium, some car dealerships, and a few half-vacant of fice buildings—at its core.” A discussion of the Paris Métro links the former French president Georges Pompidou to a misguided strain of futurism that also included legendary modernists such as Moses, Le Corbusier, and even Frank Lloyd Wright. Each in his own way irrationally glorified the automobile as a mechanical savior that gave its driver unprecedented personal freedom. The result was questionable urban planning “solutions” like Pompidou’s thwarted attempt to run a multilane expressway right through Paris’s historic core. (He had to settle for one along the right bank of the Seine.) Bus-loving Bogotá, bikecrazed Copenhagen, and train-mad Tokyo rate highly in Grescoe’s analysis. In all three, he suggests, citizens have assumed individual and collective responsibility for pressing urban issues and are looking to transit for solutions. Fortunately, he writes, transit is uniquely generous in the way it addresses many
of these issues while fulfilling its primary mission of getting people around. Zooming through Tokyo, awestruck not only by the sheer immensity of its integrated rail system but also by the manner in which its development defines the contours of the city’s growth, Grescoe is reminded of one planning historian’s encomium to the Japanese capital—one that neatly encapsulates his book’s message. “Tokyo’s railway system allows a city that would otherwise be an utter nightmare to work really, really well. It’s just assumed that the core of every new development will be a rail station you can walk to. If you get transit right, then the stuff that we are obsessed with in Nor th America—the detailed regulation of suburban development—becomes much less important. Tokyo shows that good public transport systems end up mitigating the most serious problems of cities.” —jeff turrentine
the forest Unseen A Year’s Watch in Nature BY david george haskell Viking, 288 pp., $25.95
LIKE SWORD SWALLOWERS, plants in cold climates must prepare carefully to absorb sharp edges. Weeks before the first hard freeze, plants move delicate structures like DNA to the center of their cells. The cells also fill with
Cage On the TV show about crabbing the Bering Sea a boat’s lines get tangled, another of those unwieldy cages gets cut loose—this costs the crabbers hundreds— & the cod-baited pot plunges to the bottom where, over the next week, crabs will enter it, will tear at the bait, will loose fragrant bits of flesh & guts that will draw more of them into the cage where they will eventually die, crustacean brains closing down into the primal, antennae & claws going still in that dark except for tidal surges that lift & drop them—but not before thousands of the females’ eggs have ripened & drifted off through the wire, & some are fertilized in clouds of the males’ milt, & some percentage of these eggs will hatch, & some of these hatchlings will survive, & these live long enough to hear our engines break down above them. —B y W i l l i a m H e y en
illustration by blair thornley
sugar molecules, which lower the freezing point of liquid. Outside the cell, unsweetened water turning to ice releases heat (a law of physics), which will warm the cell slightly. The plant cell is now a protected ball of syrup surrounded by deadly ice shards. As the biologist David George Haskell writes in his engaging new book, The Forest Unseen, “Plants in winter must swallow tens of thousands of blades, keeping each one away from their fragile hearts.” Vivid imagery is at the heart of this book, which mixes science with lushly figurative language— similes, hyperbole, personification! The hickory tree is a sports car “kept off the road by ice until late in the spring” and then leafing out quickly in summer when the watercarrying pipelines of its long, wide xylem tubes are “thrown open” to outstrip all rivals. Describing the honey locust’s thorny stems, once a defense against the now-extinct mastodon and still twice as high as any deer can reach, Haskell observes, “These widowed plants wear history on their sleeves.” Later he mourns, “A forest without large herbivores is an orchestra without violins.” Although the metaphors extend sometimes farther than you want, biochemistry has never had a more enthusiastic storyteller. Our Scheherazade begins with the scene of two Tibetan monks funneling streams of colored sand in the creation of a mandala, a circle filled with symbols that reflect the cosmos. Mandala can be translated to mean “community.” For his exploration of community, Haskell chose a circle of old-growth forest in hilly Tennessee, a little more than a yard across, which he visits every week for a year. He sits next to his “mandala” on a slab of sandstone, quiet, observant, with no scientific agenda, nothing to prove, and no instrument but a hand lens. From this perch, we watch how plants and animals adapt to the changing seasons, from spring storms to oppressive summer
s p o t l i g h t
ON THIS EARTH, A SHADOW FALLS By Nick Brandt, Abrams, $160 it’s difficult to think of a greater or more passionate
wildlife photographer than Nick Brandt, who left a successful career as a music video director (for Michael Jackson, among others) to document the majestic, threatened megafauna of East Africa. Some of Brandt’s black-and-white images, like that of an arc of wildebeest crossing a river or a procession of elephants across a velvet plain, capture the vastness of the African landscape. But most are shot in close-up (Brandt declines to use a telephoto lens). In one of the essays that accompany this volume, the novelist Alice Sebold describes Brandt’s intimate portraits, like this one of a lion in Kenya’s Masai Mara National Reserve, as having “the haunting resonance of the photographs of Civil War generals long dead.”
brightness, when a fleck of sun can be so intense that unprepared leaves are in danger of being “zapped” by the light’s energized electrons. We become intimate with bees and chickadees and the short, violent lives of shrews. We gain a new spatial perspective probing beneath leaf litter for pink hemipteran bugs and white springtails. Looking at the partnerships of lichen (fungus and algae) or of a tree’s root system (plant and fungus), we become aware of our own interdependencies, the microbes in our gut and
the mitochondria in our cells. “We are Russian dolls,” Haskell writes, “our lives made possible by other lives within us.” Occasionally our study is interrupted. Walking to the mandala one morning, the author is outraged at the sight of a stream ransacked by poachers looking for salamanders to use as fish bait. His heart begins to fibrillate, and he spends the afternoon in the hospital. Another visit reveals two glossy-white domes within the mandala—the balls have been sent over like alien spaceships
from a nearby golf course. The biologist deliberates and then leaves them alone, reasoning that the golf balls belong here too, “the manifestation of the mind of a clever, playful African primate.” In the end, we can’t love nature and hate humanity both, for we are one and the same. As the book comes full circle, January 1 to December 31, so Haskell’s richly wrought creation nicely reflects the Tibetan mandala he first describes, a symbol for a much larger community. — sharman apt russell
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Dispatches news and views from the natural resources defense council
Looking to the future An EPA proposal would limit the release of CO2 to help curb climate change.
STOPPING CARBON pollution aT THE SOURCE Proposed federal standards would force new coal and gas power plants to reduce their carbon emissions
T
he Environmental protection agency
has proposed the first national standards to limit carbon pollution from new coal and gas power plants. Electric power generation is the largest source of U.S. carbon-dioxide emissions, contributing to global warming and adversely affecting human health. If approved, these would be the first national limitations placed on industrial sources of carbon emissions and could usher in a series of stricter emissions standards. The stage was set for the EPA’s action by the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision in Massachusetts vs. EPA, in which the Court agreed with NRDC and a coalition of states and other environmental organizations that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases are air pollutants under the federal Clean Air Act. The new EPA standards would allow
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only up to 1,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per megawatt hour—a level that can easily be met by modern gas-burning power plants. Coalfueled plants can meet this standard, too, if they use carbon capture and storage technology to keep their CO2 out of the air. Still, the proposed standards must jump through a few hoops before they become law. The agency is accepting public comment through mid-June; the final standards are expected near the end of the year, according to Pete Altman, director of NRDC’s Climate and Clean Air Campaign. Polluters may challenge the standards in court or try to get Congress to overturn them next year (although that’s generally a tall order). Meanwhile, Altman is working to raise public awareness to show members of Congress that there is overwhelming support for curbing dangerous carbon pollution. Already, nearly a million people have expressed their approval online for the standards.
oppostie: sodapix/agefotostock; right: bloomberg/getty images; top: inga spence/getty images
“We think we’ll prevail on this, but political support is necessary so the standards don’t get killed,” Altman says. New coal-burning power plants are not being proposed at present, primarily because the low price and availability of natural gas makes them economically unviable, notes NRDC senior attorney David Doniger. According to the EPA, no new coal-fueled power plants are expected until 2030, even in the absence of its proposal. But if natural gas prices should rise, making coal comparatively less expensive, the new standards would ensure that companies considering such facilities would factor in the environmental performance these plants must achieve. The new pollution limits will increase power companies’ interest in renewable energy alternatives, Doniger says. The EPA is required under the Clean Air Act to propose carbon pollution standards for the 1,500 existing power plants that annually emit 2.4 billion tons of CO2—40 percent of the U.S. total. Standards for these plants could have an important impact on public health as well, notes Kim Knowlton, an NRDC senior scientist. Global climate change is expected to cause more heat waves and rising smog levels, since hotter air produces more ozone, the primary component of smog. “If you know someone with asthma, you know someone whose health is being harmed by climate change,” Knowlton says. Altman and Doniger are optimistic about the standards, which have been a long time coming. “We’re way behind in dealing with this huge health threat, but the politics in Washington are challenging,” Altman says. “We’re glad the White House and the EPA are now moving forward.” —susan E. matthews
A Golden Rule NRDC has helped California
reach another automobile milestone. The California Air Resources Board, which regulates air quality, passed new car emission rules that require 15 percent of cars sold in the state by 2025 to be plug-in hybrid electric models or zero-emission vehicles that run solely on electric power. These rules will result in a 75 percent reduction
keep ofF the lawn The fight to keep a poison off the market
Not in our backyards!
in smog-forming pollutants from all new automobiles sold in the state. Many states plan to follow California’s lead. Simon Mui, who directs NRDC’s California vehicles and fuels program, says the new standards “will drive forward technology and make sure automakers are seriously investing in zeroemissions vehicle programs.” —Amy Kraft
Did You Know? You can defend the environment while receiving guaranteed payments for life with an NRDC Charitable Gift Annuity. Single Life Rates Age...................... Rate 63.........................4.5% 69.........................5.0% 73.........................5.5% 76.........................6.0% 81.........................7.0% 86.........................8.0% 90+......................9.0% For more information, contact Peter Meysenburg, NRDC’s gift planning officer, at (212) 727-4583 and pmeysenburg@nrdc.org
Natural Resources Defense Council 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011
www.nrdc.org/giftannuity
T
he ongoing battle over the harmful pesticide
2,4-D, has posed a tough challenge for NRDC. The Environmental Protection Agency recently announced that it would not heed NRDC’s warnings about 2,4-D, leaving it on the market for purchase by consumers. But don’t expect this setback to halt NRDC’s efforts to limit use of the chemical. NRDC originally submitted a petition in November 2008 that asked the EPA to ban 2,4-D from public sale. Created in the chemical boom of World War II, 2,4-D was commercially released in 1946 and was one of the original ingredients in Agent Orange, the Vietnam-era defoliant. Unlike Agent Orange, 2,4-D is still widely available, often as an ingredient in fertilizer products designed to kill weeds, according to NRDC senior scientist Gina Solomon. “Consumers think it’s a lawn fertilizer—and it is—but it’s laced with a pesticide,” Solomon says, noting that 2,4-D is replaceable and would be easy to take off the market. In February, with the EPA still having failed to respond to the petition, NRDC filed a lawsuit against the agency, demanding that it address the petition’s concerns. In April the EPA responded by denying NRDC’s request to take 2,4-D off the market. NRDC is now evaluating options for pursuing action against the chemical. “EPA decided that there wasn’t enough data to ban the chemical. It didn’t conclude that it’s safe,” Solomon says. Exposure to 2,4-D is associated with neurological problems, reproductive abnormalities, non-Hodgkins lymphoma, and hormone disruption, according to Solomon, who is a physician. She explains that even though the compound breaks down quickly in sunlight, it is easily transported indoors, mainly by sticking to people’s shoes. Once inside, it can stay on carpets for up to a year, increasing human exposure. Although the chemical was created before the EPA was established in 1970, it was reviewed and approved by the agency in 2005. The EPA, notes Solomon, “omitted all kinds of information and cherry-picked studies. Their conclusions were not really supported by the evidence.” The most recent decision similarly focused on specific studies and failed to address the larger picture, according to Solomon. Controlling the pesticide has become even more urgent, as certain crops are now being genetically modified to withstand higher levels of 2,4-D. This could open the door to heavier application —s.E.M. of the chemical.
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TRUTH SQUAD
THE “FACTS,” ACCORDING TO BIG OIL
I
N RESPONSE TO REMARKS MADE BY PRESIDENT OBAMA DURING HIS STATE OF THE Union address last January, the American Petroleum Institute issued a statement of “Energy Myths & Facts.” OnEarth asked two NRDC experts—Brian Siu, a policy analyst who works on fuel and vehicle issues, and federal transportation policy director Deron Lovaas—to double-check API’s facts.
President: “We have subsidize d oil companies for a century.” FACT: The U.S. oil and natura l gas industry does not receive tax subsidies. What the administration is pro posing—an $85 billion tax hike—will impede investmen t in U.S. energy resources...and increase the volatility of gasoline markets.
Yes!
Dangerous and dirty
Sui says: That’s not true. Historically, the government has reduced taxes on the oil and gas industry, often to encourage more drilling. They call this “tax expenditure” because it’s the same as spending money or subsidizing. According to the Office of Management and Budget, repealing several of these oil and gas tax expenditures would save taxpayers more than $4 billion a year.
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Not true. API insinuates that eliminating drilling subsidies will cause oil companies to drill less because it won’t be as profitable to do so. But oil prices are already above $100 per barrel, so we don’t need to encourage drilling through taxpayer handouts. And ending subsidies won’t affect gas prices, either. Oil prices are set on the world market, not by individual countries.
Lovaas says: API is suspiciously selective when it explains why oil consumption is down. Yes, the economy is one reason. But API ignores two significant trends: more people are buying fuel-efficient cars, and public transportation ridership around the country is booming—both indications of a strong movement away from oil consumption.
API questions the 2 percent figure, which represents the amount of oil the U.S. government has determined can be economically recovered. Sure, we could tap more oil, but it’s in dangerous locations and the methods for recovering it are highly polluting and more expensive. For this reason, the president has urged Americans to look for other ways to decrease our oil consumption.
pollution from two coal-fired power plants in Chicago has been wafting into homes and sickening residents in nearby neighborhoods. Because both the Crawford plant in Chicago’s Little Village and the Fisk plant in Pilsen were built long before the passage of the 1970 Clean Air Act, they were exempt from installing pollution-control devices. Lawmakers assumed that the plants would soon shut down. But the owner of the utilities, Midwest Generation, found ways to continue running them without complying with crucial Clean Air Act safeguards. For years, neighborhood residents, NRDC, and other environmental groups have called on the company to close the plants. Lawsuits were filed alleging that Midwest Generation was violating air pollution standards, but the coal plants were able to postpone the necessary upgrades. Finally, after more lawsuits, the company was required to retrofit the plants with adequate pollution controls—a costly endeavor. Instead, Midwest Generation agreed to close Fisk by the end of the year and Crawford by the end of 2014. The plants were “outmoded, inefficient, and subsidized by people’s lungs,” says Henry Henderson, director of NRDC’s Midwest office. The city of Chicago is now working with the communities to find the best way to make use of the two large structures. Suggestions for the sites include a green space and a cultural center.—A.K.
above: mct/getty images.; opposite top right: The compound
For decades, particulate
That’s long enough!
President: “Not only that – las t year, we relied less on foreign oil than in any of the past sixteen years” FACT: Unfortunately, some of the credit for this goes to the nation’s struggling eco nomy. The economy is requiring less oil, and less is imported as a result. President: “But with only 2 percent of the world’s oil reserves, oil isn’t enough .” FACT: This is misleading. Res erves do not include undiscovered resource potent ial. According to currently available statistics.. .the United States has the most technically recoverab le oil and nat ura l gas resources in the world.
Breathing Easier
NRDC in the NEWS “ ‘Home-grown sources of energy
“ ‘By curbing the biggest sources
certainly are preferable to imports, especially from unstable regions of the world,’ said Frances Beinecke, president of the Natural Resources Defense Council, in a statement. ‘But as the president noted, feeding our addiction to fossil fuels is not the long-term solution; we need to embrace renewable sources of energy with even greater fervor as well as energy efficiency.’” —From “Obama Calls for Offshore Oil Drilling and Clean Energy,” USA Today, January 24, 2012
of pollution in the Santa Monica Bay, we can keep trips to Malibu beaches carefree and prevent people from getting sick when they go in the ocean,’” Steve Fleischli, the Natural Resources Defense Council’s senior attorney, said in a statement.” —From “$6.6-Million Settlement Reached on Malibu Beach Water Pollution,” Los Angeles Times, April 13, 2012
“ ‘The rise of superbugs that we see “ ‘Public health authorities in the U.S. and around the world agree that the overuse of vast quantities of antibiotics on livestock to hasten weight gain and compensate for crowded, filthy conditions is contributing to the crisis of antibiotic resistance in human medicine,’ said Avinash Kar, an attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council.” —From “U.S. Urges Voluntary Cuts in Farm Antibiotics,” Agence France Presse, April 11, 2012
show us your nature
now was predicted by F.D.A. in the ’70s,’ said Jen Sorenson, a lawyer for the Natural Resources Defense Council. ‘Thanks to the court’s order, drug manufacturers will finally have to do what F.D.A. should have made them do 35 years ago: prove that their drugs are safe for human health, or take them off the market.’” —From “F.D.A. Is Ordered to Restrict Use of Antibiotics in Livestock,” New York Times, March 23, 2012
Submit your photos at onearth.org/photocontest
A VERY HUNGRY CATERPILLAR This western tent caterpillar, Malacosoma californicum, is munching its way through the leaves of a thistle plant as it prepares to build its cocoon. The caterpillar captured the attention of Kathy Barnhart while she was eating lunch in Mt. Diablo, California, near San Francisco. Barnhart photographed the insect using a Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi. The caterpillar will trade in its flashy blue and orange stripes by mid-July, when it metamorphoses into a more subdued reddish-brown moth.
Savory Future Who are the nation’s
leaders when it comes to sustainably producing our food? Each year, NRDC embarks on a nationwide search and bestows on visionary men and women its Growing Green Awards. This year, Andrea Northup, 25 years old, won the Young Food Leader award for creating the D.C. Farm to School Network, which links school cafeterias with local farmers. George Siemon, CEO of Organic Valley, in La Farge, Wisconsin, won the Business Leader award for organizing the largest organic farming cooperative in North America. The award for Food Producer went to Gabe Brown of Brown Ranch in Bismarck, North Dakota, for his methods of sustainable ranching. One example: mob grazing, in which a high density of animals graze a field for a short time and are then moved to another pasture to give the grazed plot of land time to recover. The practice helps eliminate the use of fertilizers. Greg Asbed and Lucas Benitez won the Food Justice Leader award for co-founding the Coalition of Immokalee Workers, in southwestern Florida. The coalition fights for fair wages for farmworkers and educates farm laborers about their rights. For more information about the winners, go to nrdc.org/ health/growinggreen.asp —a.k.
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who we are
what we do
The former college hockey player grew up near Chicago and recently took part in the annual U.S. Pond Hockey Championships on a frozen lake in Minneapolis. Skoglund, now 33, is also a hunter, fly-fisherman, and trail runner who credits a summer program at the National Outdoor Leadership School, in which he participated as a teenager, for
Montana state officials, who would drive them back into the park. Skoglund collaborated with the Citizens’ Working Group, a coalition of ranchers, farmers, landowners, and bison advocates, to come up with a solution. Eventually the group agreed to endorse a plan that would open up, yearround, a portion of nearby national forest that had previously
at yellowstone’s door
Matt Skoglund’s Montana neighbors include bison, gray wolves, bears, and elk.
THE natural A love of the northern Rockies brings a lawyer west— where he advocates for the region’s iconic wildlife
M
by todd wilkinson
att Skoglund reaches the Bozeman
Creek trailhead and quickly ascends into the Gallatin Mountains, a popular hiking and mountain-biking area south of Bozeman, Montana. The forested foothills, a spur of the northern Rockies, function as a crossroads for wildlife, including grizzlies, wolves, and mountain lions. They’re also a source of the freshwater that flows to thousands of the city’s taps. There aren’t too many places in the Lower 48 where a bustling college town can boast of such an unbroken stretch of scenic public lands right at its back door. This natural asset hasn’t been preserved by accident, of course, but through vigilant stewardship on the part of citizens—citizens like Matt Skoglund. As an NRDC wildlife advocate based in Montana, he has transformed a calling into a career.
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opening his eyes to the beauty and majesty of the West. He never forgot the experience. After graduating from Middlebury College, Skoglund earned a law degree from the University of Illinois. He clerked for a federal judge and then worked at a Chicago law firm. But the West beckoned; after two years, he returned to the region and took a job with NRDC. One of his specialties is creating consensus over divisive issues. Building broad citizen coalitions, he says, is the most effective way to safeguard the things that everyone treasures. “It isn’t easy,” he admits. “But if you get buy-in and support from the greatest variety of people, long-term conservation is more effective.” Take the case of the bison. These icons of the Great Plains can be infected with brucellosis, a disease that, if transmitted to domestic cattle, can cause cows to abort their pregnancies, costing ranchers serious money. In years past, migratory bison— they drift out of their protected home in Yellowstone during deep snows—didn’t receive a warm welcome from local citizens or
been accessible to the bison for only part of the year. “They’re symbols of the West,” says Skoglund, “but bison have been treated as an exotic species. We need to respect and value them as the native wildlife they are.” He sees the controversy as a lens through which we can view issues facing all large mammals in need of habitat. Yellowstone’s grizzly bear and gray wolf populations, he notes, dwindled greatly, with the latter enduring nearly total annihilation. But a combination of creative thinking (such as the importing of gray wolves from western Canada in 1995 and 1996) and public consciousnessraising has enabled those species to thrive once again. “If we’re going to have healthy populations of bison, grizzlies, wolves, and other animals, we need to think on a bigger scale and find better ways to achieve coexistence,” Skoglund says. “We need to plan ahead.” Follow Matt Skoglund on Twitter (@YellowstoneMatt) or read his NRDC Switchboard blog at onearth.org/skoglund.
photograph for onearth by thomas lee
Building broad citizen coalitions, Skoglund says, is the most effective way to safeguard the things that everyone treasures
NRDC Board of Trustees Daniel R. Tishman, Chair Frederick A.O. Schwarz, Jr. Chair Emeritus Adam Albright, Vice Chair Patricia Bauman, Vice Chair Robert J. Fisher, Vice Chair Alan Horn, Vice Chair Joy Covey, Treasurer John H. Adams, Founding Director, NRDC Richard E. Ayres Anna Scott Carter Susan Crown Laurie David Leonardo DiCaprio
John E. Echohawk Michel Gelobter, Ph.D. Arjun Gupta Van Jones Philip B. Korsant Nicole Lederer Michael Lynton Shelly B. Malkin Josephine A. Merck Kelly Chapman Meyer Mary Moran Peter A. Morton Wendy K. Neu Frederica P. Perera, Ph.D. Robert Redford Laurance Rockefeller Jonathan F. P. Rose Frances Beinecke , President
Thomas W. Roush, M.D. Philip T. Ruegger, III William H. Schlesinger Wendy Schmidt James Gustave Speth Max Stone James Taylor Gerald Torres Eric Wepsic George M. Woodwell, Ph.D.
honorary trustees Dean Abrahamson, M.D., Ph.D. Robert O. Blake Henry R. Breck Joan K. Davidson Sylvia A. Earle, Ph.D.
James B. Frankel Hamilton F. Kean Charles E. Koob Ruben Kraiem Burks B. Lapham Maya Lin Michael A. McIntosh, Sr. Daniel Pauly Nathaniel P. Reed Cruz Reynoso John R. Robinson Christine H. Russell, Ph.D. John Sheehan David Sive Frederick A. Terry, Jr. Thomas A. Troyer Kirby Walker Elizabeth Wiatt
Peter Lehner, Executive Director
How to do more Jean Schauffler, a longtime resident of Elmira, New York, joined NRDC in 1984 because she was outraged at the coal industry’s policy of clear-cut logging and mountaintop removal. As someone who enjoyed gardening and bird-watching in her youth, she was devastated to see how quickly open lands were disappearing. NRDC’s “foresight and efficiency” in response to these issues deeply impressed her. Now keenly aware of the hydrofracking controversies in nearby Pennsylvania (whose border is just five miles from her home) and worried that New York will soon become embroiled in a similar dilemma, she upped her commitment by including NRDC as a beneficiary in her estate plans. Schauffler, who for more than three decades taught elementary school band (she herself was an accomplished clarinet player), says that making a gift from her estate was “simple” and “gives me a sense that I’m actually doing something important.” She adds, “I have always wanted to do more—and now I am!” 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.
Visit us.macmillan.com/static/stmartinspress/empireofshadows.html for more.
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open space throwing away the book
the same six-inch distance, until I reached my dock 10 minutes later. Mentored by dragonflies, I learned to take the gaps in field guides as field guides about 14 years ago, when I built a home on a quiet little lake in upstate New York. The variety of aquatic license for purposeless observation. One early June day last summer, a and wetland life suddenly available for inspection was over- large dragonfly was guarding a stretch of lily pads, shuttling back and whelming, and I depended on the guides to aid, abet, and forth at a speed that made it hard for me to do more than keep him confirm my beginner’s observations. Pretty soon, though, in blurred sight. A few times, though, he caught light when passing I felt the stirrings of resistance, the kind one might feel toward an over- near and I saw three markings on each long wing and coppery bands ringing his dark brown abdomen. directive mentor who was cramping a I tried to see his face color but never more open-ended learning curve. could, though he shuttled past at least So when dragonflies captured my a hundred times, always within a foot attention, I was both frustrated and or two of my nose. When I paddled a relieved to discover there was no field few strokes to get a less myopic view, guide to direct me. I simply began nothe shifted his flight path to make the ing everything I could—the variety of same nose clearance. I paddled again, size, shape, color, flight pattern, behe shifted again. He was apparently as havior. Because there was no possibilwatchful of me as I was of him. ity of species identification, I had no Finally, I needed to rest my eyes. preordained notions about what was With the kayak nestled against the important to observe, what not. bank, I gazed up and saw a tan splotch Classification systems tend to emon the pale underside of a green leaf. phasize traits that have a clear conI reached up and a small beige moth nection to species survival, so when fluttered onto my hand. There was a the first dragonfly field guide was slight breeze and a red-winged blackpublished two years later, it contained bird creeee-ed in the marsh. plenty about how dragonflies go about And then I lost track—of time, of getting food and sex. The guide had myself. All I had filtered out in my nothing to say, though, about the death intense focus on the dragonfly rushed dance I saw performed by a small goldin. Suddenly, there was no center and bodied dragonfly that visited my patio periphery, no observer and observed. one September morning. The dragonfly, the moth, the leaf, the The dragonfly, showing no apparWhen you encounter idiosyncrasy, breeze and shimmer, the crees and plops, ent weakness, did a perfectly vertical you are on your own, all were subsumed in an overarching headstand on a patio stone, held the whether you’re trying to make sense vibrance, and so, for a spell, was I. position for a few seconds, then flopped When I emerged, I was struck by this on his back; he righted himself, then of another species or of ours irony: in these rare moments of appreperched on the palm of my hand, repeated the headstand and back flop several times until finally he did hending the lake whole, feeling a connectivity coursing through its many not rise again. The next September, another small gold dragonfly gave parts, the experience arises not from the blurring of boundaries but from the close observation of idiosyncrasies. Field guides teach you how to the same performance, with the same ending, on the same surface. And there was the dark brown dragonfly I saw floating on his back see what’s common to a species. When you encounter idiosyncrasy—a in the lake, legs flailing in the air. I scooped him onto my kayak paddle, dragonfly’s death dance or head-circling, a human’s gobsmacked stare held the paddle still until the sun dried his wings, and he flew off. at a tan splotch detaching from a leaf—you are on your own, whether Seconds later, he was back, hovering six inches in front of my face, you’re trying to make sense of another species or of ours. his huge compound eyes fixed on mine. Then he darted to my left ear, hovered, to the back of my head, hovered, to my right ear, hovered, Le Anne Schreiber is an independent journalist, essayist, and the author of two and finally, we were face to face again. He repeated this orbit, keeping books of nonfiction, Midstream (Viking) and Light Years (The Lyons Press). entered a love/hate relationship with
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illustration by sandra dionisi
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BY L e A n n e S c h r e i b e r
Create Your Own Lasting Legacy
Š Charles Gurche
You can create your own lasting legacy when you include NRDC in your estate plans. A gift through your will, trust, retirement or life insurance plan will help preserve our magnificent natural heritage and protect the planet for generations to come. For information on how to include NRDC in your estate plans or to let us know you’ve already done so, please contact Michelle Quinones, Senior Gift Planning Specialist, at 212-727-4552 or email her at legacygifts@nrdc.org.
www.nrdc.org/legacygift