E. O. WILSON LOOKS BACK ON HIS BRILLIANT CAREER
PUBLISHED BY THE NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL
Running Dry
From Lima to Los Angeles, the survival of great cities around the globe depends on sources of water that are dwindling at an alarming rate. George Black reports from melting glaciers high in the Andes.
WINTER 2011 W W W.ONE ARTH.ORG
PLUS ISLAM AND THE ENVIRONMENT TIM FOLGER CONSIDERS THE WORLD IN 2050
contents
ONEARTH MAGAZINE
volume 32 number 4 winter 2011
FEATURE S
D E P A R T M ENTS
43 E. O. Wilson:
The Human Factor
by Elizabeth Kolbert
Looking back on his 60-year career, the pioneering biologist talks about ants, mass extinction, and the perverse ways in which Homo sapiens has created a “Star Wars civilization.”
COVER STORY
28
FROM THE EDITOR LETTERS FRONTLINES
All plant life depends on phosphorus—so what do we do when the supply runs out? Plus, a Stanford Ph.D. turns her attention to toilets.
Q&A As the country succumbs to a toxic wave of Islamophobia, Ibrahim Abdul-Matin exalts the vision of environmental stewardship he finds in the Koran.
48 Road Map to the Future
by Daniel Grushkin and Gary Hovland
24 THE SYNTHESIST
Tired of all those wasted hours sitting bumper-to-bumper staring at “Road Work Ahead” signs? Here are nine paths to cleaner, safer, and faster travel.
Infrared light, invisible to the human eye, may be an unexpected source of solar energy.
by Alan Burdick
26 LIVING GREEN by Lynne Peeples
50 All You Need
A rock star teacher and a group of passionate students show a new way for school to be cool.
Is Love
by Sharman Apt Russell
On the back roads of New Mexico, the sense of place is powerful—and everyone feels it in his or her own way.
Everyone covets the dwindling waters of Peru’s Cordillera Blanca. For agribusiness, they are a way to make the desert bloom; for energy utilities, a source of power; for peasant farmers, a gift from God.
POETRY
14
by Billy Collins
Life and Death in a Dry Land
57 Blizzard
Lima, the capital of Peru, was built more than 500 years
Winter
by Grace Schulman
ONEARTH ONLINE VISIT ONEARTH.ORG DIANE COOK AND LEN JENSHEL
8 14 17
Take a visual tour of Peru’s melting glaciers and hear George Black, author of our cover story, discuss his trip to the Andes in an audio slide show at onearth.org/media
by George Black
ago in one of the world’s driest deserts. Today the city has
54 REVIEWS
Tim Folger is skeptical of claims that there is a silver lining in the dark clouds of climate change.
64 OPEN SPACE
by Floyd Skloot Seeing things up close from a kayak can be a study in ambiguity—beauty mixed with ugliness.
I N S I D E N RDC
10
VIEW FROM NRDC
in the Andes, a magical and life-sustaining world of snow
by Frances Beinecke
peaks and glaciers is rapidly melting away. Can Peru
12
EYE ON WASHINGTON
to sustain a population of nine million. Meanwhile, high
survive? The answer will have implications for all of us.
by Bob Deans
58 DISPATCHES
Cover: Photograph for OnEarth by Tia Magallon.
Energy-efficient appliances, Laurie David’s recipe, and more.
WINTER 2011
onearth 1
onearth A Publication of the
NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL Editor-in-Chief Managing Editor Articles Editor Senior Editor Editorial Assistant Interns
DOUGLAS S. BARASCH JANET GOLD GEORGE BLACK LAURA WRIGHT MEGAN M. TEIXEIRA MICHAEL GLENN EASTER, GENEVRA PITTMAN
Art Director GAIL GHEZZI Photo Editor LILA GARNETT Associate Art Director IRENE HUANG Poetry Editor Copy Editors Research Contributing Editors
BRIAN SWANN DAVID GUNDERSON, ELISE MAR TON KATHLEEN ADAMS, MARIANA BARRERA PIECK RICK BASS, MICHAEL BEHAR, ALAN BURDICK, CRAIG CANINE, TIM FOLGER, DAVID GESSNER, EDWARD HOAGLAND, SHARON LEVY, BILL MCKIBBEN, MARY OLIVER, ELIZABETH ROYTE, ALEX SHOUMATOFF, BRUCE STUTZ
Online Editors SCOTT DODD, LAURA WRIGHT Community Editors EMILY GERTZ, BEN JERVEY Online Production DAVE LEVITAN, AUDEN SHIM, WILLIAM TAM Creative Consultant J.-C. SUARÈS Special Projects FRANCESCA KOE Advertising Director LARRY GUERRA Publisher Deputy Publisher Editorial Board
PHIL GUTIS DAVID PARKER WENDY GORDON, Chair ROBER T BOURQUE, CHRIS CALWELL, SUSAN CASEY-LEFKOWITZ, NATHANAEL GREENE, HENRY HENDERSON, ROLAND HWANG, JONATHAN Z. LARSEN, JOSEPHINE A. MERCK, CULLEN MURPHY, DAVID PETTIT, LISA SUATONI, FREDERICK A. TERRY JR.
Ex Officio FRANCES BEINECKE, PETER LEHNER, LINDA LOPEZ, JACK MURRAY, PATRICIA F. SULLIVAN, WESLEY P. WARREN Founder JOHN H. ADAMS
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onearth is a quarterly magazine of thought and opinion on the environment. It is open to
diverse points of view; the opinions expressed by contributors and the editors are their own and not necessarily those of NRDC.
ABOUT NRDC
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onearth (ISSN 1537-4246) (volume 32, number 4) is published quarterly by the Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., 40 West 20th St., New York, NY 10011 and printed by The Lane Press, South Burlington, Vermont. Newsstand circulation through Disticor Magazine Distribution Services; info@disticor. com. Copyright 2010 by the Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without permission is prohibited. Periodical postage paid at New York and at additional mailing offices. NRDC Membership dues $15 annually. onearth is available to all members of NRDC upon request. Library subscription $8, one year; $15, two years; $22, three years. Single copies $5. To e-mail a change of address: nrdcinfo@nrdc.org. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to onearth, 40 West 20th St., New York, NY 10011.
VOICES ON THE WATER
Stories about the Gulf Oil Disaster you won’t hear anywhere else. Available soon on public radio stations. Available now at www.nrdc.org/storycorps
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volume 32
number 4
winter 2011
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EXCLUSIVES
Are We Losing Louisiana?
MOST POPULAR
THE BP BLOWOUT IN MAY CAUSED MONTHS OF PAIN
n Digging Into New York
and suffering for the people and environment of the Gulf Coast—a condition that persists, even now that the oil has stopped gushing from the seafloor and the story has mostly faded from the headlines. But Louisiana was in trouble long before the Deepwater Horizon disaster. Its wetlands are vanishing at the rate of a football field every hour because of rising sea level, storm damage, and the re-engineering of the Mississippi River. The disappearance of wetlands means the loss of wildlife, jobs, and a way of life. In a special online series, Barry Yeoman explores the Gulf Coast’s ongoing environmental, economic, and cultural crisis and asks how we preserve an important part of our national heritage. Read his stories: onearth.org/losing-louisiana
City’s Trashy Past n Battling Bedbugs n She’s a Genius for Honeybees n Invisible Disaster: Fall Migration Over the Gulf n ”Carbon Trees” Would Suck CO2 Out of the Air and Put It Into Your Soda
ABOVE: SHUTTERSTOCK; LEFT: CHRIS PETERSON
4P H O T O S
More stories you’ll find only online: onearth.org/topic/ web_exclusives
& VIDEO
CUTEST CLIMATE VICTIMS?
VIDEO: ART AT THE DUMP
Relatives of the rabbit, furry pikas like the cold. So as the mountains get warmer, pikas get rarer. We visit a highaltitude refuge where they can still frolic—for now. onearth.org/gallery
The artists-in-residence program at San Francisco‘s city dump lets sculptors scour 30-foot-tall trash heaps for material and inspiration. That’s recycling! onearth.org/media
ENTER OUR PHOTO CONTEST SHARE YOUR BEST nature photography with us. We’ll publish our favorite shot in the pages of the magazine [see this issue’s pick on p. 61].
LINK TO OUR NETWORK Facebook.com/onearth.org Twitter.com/OnEarthMag YouTube.com/ OnEarthMagazine Flickr.com/OnEarthMag OWNERSHIP STATEMENT Statement of ownership, management, and circulation (required by 39 U.S.C. 3685) of OnEarth, published quarterly and owned by the Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., President, Frances Beinecke; Editor, Douglas S. Barasch, 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011. Known bondholders, mortgages, and other security holders owning or holding one percent or more of the total amount of bonds, mortgages, and other securities: none. The purpose, function, and nonprofit status of this organization and the exempt status for federal income tax purposes have not changed during the preceding twelve months. The average number of copies printed of each issue during the preceding twelve months was: A. Total number of copies printed: 144,192. B. Paid circulation: (1) Mailed outside-county paid subscriptions stated on PS Form 3541: 135,464. (2) Mailed in-county paid subscriptions stated on PS Form 3541: 0; (3) Paid distribution outside the mails including sales through dealers and carriers, street vendors, counter sales, and other paid distribution outside USPS: 2,437; (4) Paid distribution by other classes of mail through the USPS: 0. C. Total paid distribution: 137,901. D. Free or nominal rate distribution: (1) Free or nominal rate outside-county copies included on PS Form 3541: 2,289; (2) Free or nominal rate in-county copies included on PS Form 3541: 0; (3) Free or nominal rate copies mailed at other classes through the USPS: 0; (4) Free or nominal rate distribution outside the mail: 3,995. E. Total free or nominal rate distribution: 6,284. F. Total distribution: 144,185. G. Copies not distributed: 7. H. Total: 144,192. I certify that the statements made by me above are correct and complete. DOUGLAS S. BARASCH, EDITOR
WINTER 2011
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contributors GEORGE BLACK (“Life and Death in a Dry Land,” p. 28) is OnEarth’s articles editor. This is his fourth collaboration with photographers Diane Cook and Len Jenshel, pictured with him here in a Peruvian asparagus packing plant. His last OnEarth cover story, “India, Enlightened,” appears in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2010. FLOYD SKLOOT (“Crossing the Channel,” p. 64) is a poet, essayist, and fiction writer. His work has won three Pushcart Prizes and a PEN USA Literary Award, and has appeared in the Best American Essays, Best American Science and Nature Writing, Best Spiritual Writing, and Best Food Writing anthologies.
GARY HOVLAND (“Road Map to the Future,” p. 48) is a graduate of the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, where he later taught an undergraduate class on humorous illustration. His clients have included the New York Times, Esquire, the New Yorker, W, Vanity Fair, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. OUR PAPER AND PRINTING onearth is committed to environmentally sound publishing practices. Our text stock contains a minimum of 30 percent postconsumer waste and is certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ensuring that the world’s forests are sustainably managed. Our cover stock contains a minimum of 10 percent postconsumer waste.
BLACK, COOK, AND JENSHEL: MARIO VILDOSOLA; SKLOOT: BEVERLY HALLBERG; HOVLAND: JACK HOVLAND
TIM FOLGER (“Winners and Losers,” p. 54) has been writing about science and the environment for more than 20 years. In 2007 he won the American Institute of Physics science writing award. His work has appeared in Discover, National Geographic, Scientific American, and other magazines.
Fo ll Bic ow R Pa yc u th le ss Le o & ssP dy La ed ssey ura ale @ ’s d.c om
SUSTAINABLE TRANSPORTATION (for your drinks)
editor’s letter
N
SOS MESSAGES RECEIVED FROM NEAR AND FAR
DOUGLAS S. BARASCH
8 onearth
WINTER 2011
JEFF WEINER
o matter who occupies the halls of Congress, no matter what transpires at U.N. conferences, the physics of climate change remains the same. Climate scientist Lonnie Thompson, the world’s leading expert on high-altitude glaciers, likes to cite this observation from the geophysicist Henry Pollack: “Ice asks no questions, presents no arguments, reads no newspapers, listens to no debates. It is not burdened by ideology and carries no political baggage as it changes from solid to liquid. It just melts.” After talking with Thompson, our articles editor, GEORGE BLACK, bore this in mind during his recent reporting journey to Peru for our cover story, “Life and Death in a Dry Land.” Andean glaciers are melting away, and their gradual disappearance inevitably dims the prospects of a country whose 30 million inhabitants depend on this water supply for agriculture, hydropower, and basic human needs. Peru’s glaciers also offer scientists like Thompson an extraordinarily rich opportunity to understand the past, present, and future of climate change, while the country’s ancient archaeological record yields evidence of another sort: that thriving civilizations have collapsed in the wake of a climate catastrophe. Could this happen again? Peru’s problems may seem distant from our own, but the consequences of climate change so starkly apparent in the Andean peaks and in a desert city like Lima are strikingly similar to threats we face closer to home—say, in Los Angeles or San Diego, otherwise thriving cities in water-starved landscapes. The monumental challenge before us is to both drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and to strike a more sustainable balance between energy consumption and natural resources. Regarding the former, DANIEL GRUSHKIN and illustrator GARY HOVLAND team up to create a “Road Map to the Future,” which shows how the U.S. transportation system could decrease carbon pollution by millions of tons per year. BOB DEANS, a veteran White House reporter and now associate communications director at NRDC, examines a similar approach in his Eye on Washington column. The other side of the equation—adaptation—is explored by contributing editor TIM FOLGER in a sober essay on a new book, The World in 2050, which, according to its author, Laurence C. Smith, will be shaped by rising temperatures, a melting Arctic, shrinking water supplies, increased fossil-fuel consumption and pollution, and three billion more inhabitants competing for the planet’s finite resources. Although the courage to address climate change has flagged (temporarily, I hope) in Congress, other public officials, as well as entrepreneurs, business leaders, scientists, and ordinary citizens, are acting with urgency and creativity. You’ll meet a number of them in this issue: the pioneering biologist E. O. Wilson, who tells ELIZABETH KOLBERT of the need for humans to cultivate “a new kind of self-understanding”; “water harvesters” in the slums of Lima; a young American woman who is converting human waste (literally) into hope in Haiti; and a schoolteacher in Redmond, Washington, whose innovative Cool School Challenge offers climate solutions to high school classrooms around the world. All in all, these stories suspend us in a rough equilibrium between alarm and hope that seems appropriate for our times.
view from NRDC
T
HROUGH FOUR DECADES OF POLITICAL CHANGE, NRDC HAS
advocated an assertive and progressive environmental agenda. Congressional majorities and committee chairmanships may shift, but the values and vision that bind us do not. That’s because a secure and prosperous America depends on clean water, air, and land, and on energy and transportation policies that will reduce our reliance on oil, put Americans back to work, and create a healthier future for our children. While voters nationwide expressed anger about the economy, in California voters trounced a cynical bid—bankrolled by a handful of out-of-state companies—to turn back the clock on laws that hold polluters accountable to the people. It was the first time Americans anywhere had the chance to cast a ballot for our clean-energy future. Given the choice, voters want to move forward with 21st-century energy solutions and the vast opportunities they create, rather than look back to a fossil-fueled past. And move forward we will. NRDC is zeroing in on opportunities that rest with the Obama administration’s regulatory and budget authority. We will continue to work in California and other states and localities where officials understand the possibilities presented by the clean-energy future. We will certainly face many battles against those in Congress who seek to roll back historic protections against pollution. But we know we have the public solidly on our side: nearly nine in ten Americans—87 percent—want utilities to produce more energy from renewable sources, such as solar and wind, according to the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press. Nearly eight in ten Americans favor legislation that improves energy efficiency in workplaces and homes. And 79 percent want better gas mileage for cars and trucks. Meanwhile, NRDC is moving forward with another critical piece of our work: putting clean energy to work in everyday life. We can talk all we want to about transit policy and efficiency standards, but seeing bike lanes and smart meters in our neighborhood’s really brings climate solutions home. This is where innovative elected officials come in. They have the power to launch sweeping campaigns, and many are turning to clean-energy initiatives to revitalize their economies and make their communities more livable. Working with mayors to put these concrete clean-energy solutions in place and tapping the administration’s authority to put new standards on the books, NRDC can make lasting change in the coming months.
FRANCES BEINECKE, President
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WINTER 2011
NRDC IN THE NEWS “ ‘WHAT WE ARE SEEING IS the revelation of a very uncertain and unrigorous regulatory system that fails to hold the petroleum industry accountable, from the extraction to the delivery of raw product to the refining and delivery of finished product,’ said Henry Henderson, director of the Midwest program for the Natural Resources Defense Council.”—From “Nearby Oil Spill Highlights Hazards in Area’s Pipelines,” New York Times, September 16, 2010
“‘THE EPA’S NEW STUDY NEEDS “to be carried out with the utmost care to identify the full range of risks,’ said Kate Sinding, senior attorney with the New York-based Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental organization. ‘It is no exaggeration to say all eyes, both in the United States and around the world, are on EPA.’”—From “New Yorkers Spar Over U.S. EPA Study of Natural-Gas Fracturing,” Bloomberg, September 14, 2010
“ ‘TODAY’S ACTIONS ARE premature,” said Peter Lehner, executive director of the Natural Resources Defense Council. ‘To ensure a disaster like this never happens again, we must know what caused it in the first place. We’re still waiting for that answer.’”—From “U.S. Lifts Ban on Deep-Water Drilling,” Washington Post, October 13, 2010
MATT GREENSLADE/PHOTO-NYC.COM
FINDING LOCAL SOLUTIONS TO GLOBAL PROBLEMS
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60 . . . . . . . . . . 5.2% 65 . . . . . . . . . . 5.5% 70 . . . . . . . . . . 5.8% 75 . . . . . . . . . . 6.4% 80 . . . . . . . . . . 7.2% 85 . . . . . . . . . . 8.1% 90+ . . . . . . . . . 9.5% For more information, with no obligation, please contact: Peter Meysenburg, Gift Planning Officer NRDC, 40 W. 20th Street, New York, NY 10011 212-727-4583 or legacygifts@nrdc.org www.nrdc.org/giftplanning
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eye on washington
BY BOB DEANS
THE BIPARTISAN ENVIRONMENT and light rail for commuters. Bus systems that run on natutend to cleave the Washington ral gas. A network of charging stations for a new generation landscape. They give the winning of electric cars. Communities that reflect the way many party a mandate—its populist people choose to live, where homes are built within walking marching orders: Cut taxes. Fix or biking distance of the places we go to shop, work, or health care. Start the economy. be entertained. (See “Road Map to the Future,” page 48.) Stop the war. Every American everywhere would benefit. We could What’s the mandate, though, create millions of jobs. We could improve our economic when fear and anger are the driv- competitiveness by squeezing inefficiency and waste from ing forces of change? the transportation system depended upon by citizens and Congress is wrestling with that question in the wake of businesses nationwide. And we could do all this in a way Republicans’ historic November gains, victories that earned that reduces our national dependence on oil and strikes them majority control of the House and cut the Democrats’ a blow against the carbon pollution that threatens us all. majority in the Senate to a sliver. Fueled by $4 billion in The massive legislation that governs national transportaspending—a record for midterm elections—and spiced tion policy has been extended four times since it expired up by the rise of Tea Party activists, this was an election in 2009. If a new transportation bill isn’t acted upon by the more about grievance than hope. A sputtering economy left lame-duck session, it must be a high order of business for voters resentful and scared. the 112th Congress. They turned that against the It should be integrated We need a new vision: party in power. with a 21st-century energy Better railroads and light rail for Anger, though, is no manstrategy centered on the need commuters. Bus systems that run on to reduce our reliance on oil. date. As to good governance, fear is no guide. Together, natural gas. Charging stations for a The BP blowout in the Gulf fear and anger will not create of Mexico last spring was a new generation of electric cars. a single job, shave a penny off terrible reminder of the price the national debt, or improve by one math quiz the quality we pay for using 800 million gallons of oil—enough to fill of our public schools. Progress in those areas is going to the Empire State Building three times—every single day take ideas, leadership, and the steady political work of in this country. building consensus—across the nation and in Congress. That, though, is only part of the price. We import about Maybe it’s time we stopped looking for a mandate and six out of every ten gallons we consume, often from counstarted searching, instead, for common ground. tries that don’t share our values or goals. That’s why presiThe environmental agenda is a good place to begin. That’s dents as far back as Richard Nixon have been calling on because policies that promote 21st-century energy and the country to break its addiction to oil. We know we can transportation solutions, along with clean air, water, and do this through policies that promote the use of renewable lands, are about putting our future first. Americans expect sources of power and fuel and greater efficiency in our that of Congress, no matter which party wields the gavel. workplaces, cars, and homes. We haven’t had a major overhaul of our national transportaDeveloping a 21st-century strategy for energy and transtion policy since the Eisenhower era. An enduring example portation deserves the highest legislative priority. It’s an of how congressional and presidential leadership can bend opportunity for veteran politicians and newcomers alike national resources to common goals, that policy led to the to break new ground by making common cause on issues Interstate highway system and the web of airports that have that can strengthen our economy, make our country more knit the nation together for five decades. secure, and safeguard the health of future generations. Now we need a new vision that clears the road for more efficient ways to move people and goods: Better railroads Bob Deans is NRDC’s associate director of communications.
1 2 onearth W I N T E R 2 0 1 1
ILLUSTRATION BY BRUCE MORSER
POLITICAL EARTHQUAKES
ed to the farming operations he was describing, no matter what metrics the growers/producers use. Metrics are money-managing devices, not sustainability devices. Using less of a finite resource (natural gas, for example, in the production of nitrogen fertilizers) is still using a finite resource and is not ultimately a sustainable practice. posted online by Peter McCarville
DOWN ON THE FARM I am elated to hear megabusinesses are now quantifying efficiency of resources, realizing it affects the sustainability of their bottom line—better late than never. I am dismayed to see the nascent concept of sustainability being “defined” by Unilever and Walmart, as described in “What’s New for Dinner,” by Frederick Kaufman (Fall 2010). Any accounting of environmental impact that ends at the point of sale is woefully inadequate and misleading. I would encourage the use of a clearer term such as cost analysis and leave the word sustainability for the larger concept of choosing human actions that leave the biosphere intact for our great-great grandchildren. In that sense, no matter how efficiently resources are used to create and sell a product, the most sustainable action is often not to make or buy the product at all. posted online by J Rain Frederick Kaufman describes a “best business practices” approach to industrial farming, which, of course, makes sense to anyone in business. However, I found the author’s use of the term sustainable totally unrelat-
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WINTER 2011
TO THE MOUNTAINTOP I live in southwestern Virginia, where the struggle goes on to stop mountaintop destruction by coal companies. Having been a member of NRDC for only about 10 years, I appreciated your story “A Force for Nature” (Fall 2010), which recapped the history of the organization. It is truly amazing what has been accomplished, and I shudder to think where our world would be ecologically without the work you have done. — ANNE CORLEY Bristol, Virginia
COLD, HARD FACTS In “Cold Comfort,” by Michael Behar (Fall 2010), the author states that President Jimmy Carter “lost the election and didn’t have the courage to issue final standards before leaving office.” Courage? In 1977 Carter pushed for major energy legislation, including high taxes on gasguzzling vehicles, taxes on oil, and a 50-cent tax on gasoline to be phased in over 10 years. The man had the courage and foresight to install a solar collector on the White House roof. Imagine. And that is why he, as well as Al Gore or anyone who dares question the military/industrial/oil complex, is ridiculed. posted online by Steven Matter
40 WEST 20TH STREET, NEW YORK, NY 10011
It’s odd not to see any mention of strategic tree planting, both for roads or driveways as well as residences, in Behar’s article. I don’t need air-conditioning even when it is 90 degrees Fahrenheit outside. The big, deciduous maples planted on the south side by the folks who built my old farmhouse in 1870 still function very well. The house is in the cool shade in summer, and, after the leaves shed, sunlight comes through during the fall and winter months. — RON BLACKMORE Madison, New York
OUT OF THIS WORLD There are many reasons why we push to have places protected from industrial development. We might be protecting an endangered species or an important watershed, or preventing pollution from poisoning people, or saving a wetland critical to migrating birds. And let’s not forget saving something beautiful simply for people to enjoy. The possible reasons could go on and on. But every one of them comes back to life. The goal is to protect life and the things on which life depends. None of this applies to the moon,
onearth@nrdc.org
the subject of “Save the Moon,” by Alan Burdick (The Synthesist, Fall 2010). No life. No water tables. No atmosphere. Industrial mining of the moon is hard to imagine within our lifetimes. But even if industry tries to mine the moon, there is still no air to pollute and no liquid water to pollute. What exactly are we losing? posted online by Ethan Solomita
ERRATUM In “Cold Comfort,” Michael Behar wrote that “the Ice Bear [airconditioning unit] can slash total energy consumption up to 40 percent.” The article should have made clear that this figure refers to the fuel saved by utility companies that no longer have to produce power during peak periods. The manufacturer, Ice Energy, says that it saves its customers about 5 percent to 10 percent off their energy bills. — The Editors
WRITE TO US
Got an opinion? Send in your thoughts by pen or by keyboard. Visit us on the Web at onearth.org. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.
Winter A little heat in the iron radiator, the dog breathing at the foot of the bed, and the windows shut tight, encrusted with hexagons of frost. I can barely hear the geese complaining in the vast sky, flying over the living and the dead, schools and prisons, and the whitened fields. — B Y B ILLY C OLLINS
ILLUSTRATION BY BLAIR THORNLEY
backtalk
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WINTER 2011
S C I E N C E B U S I N E S S N A T U R E T E C H N O L O G Y C U L T U R E P O L I T I C S
The Smartest Catch BURLY FISHERMEN ON
VIEW FROM 800 FEET
Waste fills an impoundment at a Lakeland, Florida, phosphate mine.
A HIDDEN COST OF FARMING The world’s food supply depends on fertilizers made from phosphate mined from the earth. Demand is growing. Supplies are finite. What happens when we run out?
PHOTOGRAPH BY J. HENRY FAIR
W
BY DANIEL GRUSHKIN
HEN DON MAVINIC LOOKS AT COW MANURE HE SEES A PUZZLE
in need of a solution. There’s phosphorus locked in there, and the world is desperate for it. Mavinic is a professor of civil engineering at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, and he knows that there are three essential nutrients on which all plant life is based: nitrogen, potassium, and phosphorus. The problem is that phosphate rock, the ore from which the mineral is extracted, is in finite supply. Over the past several years, scientists, government officials, and corporations have begun to worry about what will happen when the rock runs out. Though the immediacy of the problem is subject to debate, the need for long-term solutions is indisputable. Mavinic believes that cow pies are the future. “You talk about peak oil, but I don’t have any sympathy for that. Oil is just another form of energy that can be substituted,” Mavinic says. “You can’t live without phosphorus. Anything that grows needs it.” DANIEL GRUSHKIN is a science writer based in New York City. Brendan Borell contributed additional reporting.
Deadliest Catch made Dutch Harbor famous. But Alaska’s booming port doesn’t rake in the dough like New Bedford, Massachusetts, the beneficiary of smart environmental stewardship. After years of falling catches and near bankruptcy, the New Bedford fishing industry has a yearly harvest now estimated to be worth $249.2 million, almost $90 million more than Dutch Harbor, its closest competitor, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Some 16 years ago, overfishing had nearly wiped out scallops, New Bedford’s most valuable catch. To save the region’s fisheries, the government closed certain fishing beds, cut fishing crew sizes and their days at sea, and increased the minimum size for a “keeper,” meaning that small, young scallops had to be thrown back for the health of the population. Since then, the number of scallops has increased more than fourfold. Although scallops are thriving, bottom fish are not. The state implemented a program in 2010 to limit the bottom-fish catch. Many fishermen opposed the restrictions, but so far they have helped build up some fish populations. If the scallops offer any clues, more good things may follow. —MICHAEL G. EASTER
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with the largest reserves, uranium and radium occur naturally alongside phosphorus, and for every pound of phosphate extracted, five pounds of a radioactive byproduct called phosphogypsum are left behind. In the Bone Valley, enormous white hills made of more than a billion tons of phosphogypsum tower over central Florida’s flatlands. Similar mounds of waste are heaped near processing sites around the world, and they grow at a rate of 110 million metric tons a year. As supplies dwindle and demand increases, it becomes more economically viable to import higher-quality rock from overseas. China and Morocco control more than half of the world’s phosphate reserves, and the United States has signed a free-trade agreement
My Car Is Your Car IAN SACS STEPS UP TO A NEW
Toyota Prius and taps a plastic card against the windshield. Like magic, the doors unlock. “It’s as easy as that,” Sacs says. “Take the car and do your errands.” Sacs is the director of the Department of Transportation and Parking in Hoboken, New Jersey. In June he rolled out Hoboken Corner Cars, the country’s first citywide car-share program, the goal of which is to get privately owned cars off the road by replacing them with rentals. Sacs estimates that in the next two years at least 750 Hobokenites will relinquish their vehicles and instead use Corner Cars to run errands. Residents sign up for the program through Connect by Hertz and then pay rates ranging from $5 to $16 an hour to access one of 42 cars parked at various locations throughout the city. Unlike similar programs, such as those in Philadelphia and Aspen, Colorado, Sacs explains, a car is available within a five-minute walk from anywhere in town. If each car is used about 2.5 hours a day or more, Hertz will make enough money to sustain the program. Already, many of the cars are used far more than that. And Hoboken profits too, by renting parking spaces to Hertz. “It’s cheap, it’s easy,” Sacs says. “And it gets cars off the road.” —M.G.E.
ILLUSTRATION BY ELWOOD SMITH
oceans—by capturing it from human and animal waste. Plants need phosphorus to grow; people and animals eat plants. As a result, their waste is filled with the nutrient. Mavinic In the 1960s and 1970s, the use has already developed a technolof chemical fertilizers skyrockogy that recycles 85 percent of the eted. New, specialized breeds of phosphorus from liquid sewage grain responded well to extra fertiland turns it into seed-size crystals izer and helped to usher in an age that can be used as a fertilizer. Osof abundance known as the green tara, a Canadian company formed revolution. Today more than 99 to market the technology, has alpercent of America’s farmland is ready installed its third phosphotreated with chemical fertilizers, rus recycling system in a Suffolk, most of which contain phosphoVirginia, sewage plant that feeds rus. The United Nations projects into the James River, a tributary that to feed at least another two of the Chesapeake Bay. billion humans—the number by One cow expels as many nuwhich the world’s population is trients as 15 to 20 people, which expected to increase by 2050— is why Mavinic is taking his techglobal food production must innology to livestock farms. All the crease by 70 percent, and that will wastewater treatment plants in the require the extraction of as much United States as twice the might supply amount of phosone million phate mined to“Oil is just another form of energy metric tons of day, an amount that can be substituted. You can’t live recycled phosthat already tops without phosphorus. Anything that phorus in a 160 million metgrows needs it,” Don Mavinic says. given year, but ric tons a year. farms could In 2009, Dana supply five milCordell, a researcher at the University of with Morocco to secure phosphate lion tons. Consider that we currently use 22 million tons of phosphorus Technology in Sydney, Australia, supplies for the future. published a paper in the journal “The common phrase is that a year, and recycling programs start Global Environmental Change ar- Morocco is the ‘Saudi Arabia of to look pretty appealing. At his high-tech cow farm near guing that the world’s phosphate phosphorus,’ ” says David Vacreserves would run out within 100 cari, director of the Department of the northern edge of the Cascade years. Later that year, the pres- Civil, Environmental and Ocean Mountains, Mavinic and his stutigious British journal Nature Engineering at Stevens Institute dents have built a pilot plant published a report entitled “The of Technology in Hoboken, New that uses microwaves to break Disappearing Nutrient,” and the Jersey. “Our whole addiction to down waste from the feedlot in United Nations convened a work- Middle Eastern oil is going to be order to retrieve its valuable eleing group to begin to address replicated in this situation. We ments. Mavinic calls it his “sludge phosphate depletion. Others ar- shouldn’t be exploiting phospho- buster” and envisions a future in gue that the world has 300 years rus with abandon; we should be which farms around the world left, but few question that most thinking about and planning to process their animal manure in plants like this one and use the of the United States’ phosphate make its use sustainable.” mines will be much shorter lived. Eighty percent of the phospho- crystal end-product as fertilizer. “Phosphorus is sustainable “Basically, you’re looking at rus mined is lost to erosion and about 25 to 30 years of good mining runoff before it can be absorbed forever as long as we have huleft,” says Stephen Jasinski, a min- by plants and, ultimately, humans mans and pigs and cows running eral commodity specialist at the by way of our dinner plates. Farm- around, eating and producing United States Geological Survey. ers are beginning to rein in the waste,” says Mavinic. “If you The majority of the phosphate overuse of fertilizer, and Mavinic, compare that to the phosphate deposits in the United States are among others, is looking for ways rock reserves of the world that found in Florida, North Carolina, to intercept the nutrient before it are disappearing, you say ‘Jeez, and Idaho. In Florida, the state runs into the world’s rivers and this is not a bad alternative.’ ”
FRONTLINES
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The LargesT accidenTaL OiL spiLL in WOrLd hisTOry The Deepwater Horizon explosion of April 20, 2010 claimed eleven lives, 2,500 square miles of ocean and coastline, thousands of jobs, and decimated wildlife populations and one of the world’s prime fishing grounds.
All royalties from the sale of this book are being donated to the NRDC’s Gulf Coast recovery effort.
a Wake-Up caLL TO rescUe OUr envirOnmenT frOm fUTUre degradaTiOn But how and why did this so-called accident happen? Who was responsible? And what can be done to make sure such a devastating blowout never happens again? In Deep Water answers these questions and more. Drawing upon the resources of the Natural Resources Defense Council’s 400 scientists, activists, and researchers to document the environmental and human toll of this tragedy, In Deep Water underscores that our debilitating dependence on oil comes at an ever-greater cost to us and to the planet we inhabit.
PETER LEHNER, executive director of the NRDC, also teaches environmental law at Columbia University Law School. BOB DEANS, author of the 2007 book The River Where America Began: A Journey Along the James, was the chief Asia correspondent for Cox newspapers, and spent eight years covering the White House. Paperback • $13.95 • With 4 maps and a timeline • Foreword by Wendy Schmidt
THE EXPERIMENT NEW YORK BECAUSE EVERY BOOK IS A TEST OF NEW IDEAS
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The part that resonates the most is where the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, said that the earth is a mosque. Since everything on the planet is sacred, nothing can be debased.
Tell me about your childhood.
I grew up in Brooklyn in the 1980s, at a time when New York City had the highest murder rate in the history of the city. We would hear gunfire every night. There were crack vials in the playground next to us. We lived in the projects for a bit, but my mother would still cook tofu. We would have broccoli for lunch.
PROPHETIC MESSAGE
Abdul-Matin believes that Islam is about loving God’s creations.
When did you first begin to specifically connect your religious upbringing to environmental issues?
CALL TO WORSHIP As New York becomes a greener and more sustainable city, a young adviser to Mayor Michael Bloomberg finds inspiration in the environmental message of the Koran. In a new book, Green Deen: What Islam Teaches About Protecting the Planet, Ibrahim Abdul-Matin articulates a spiritual and ethical form of environmentalism rooted in the Koran. The son of African American converts to Islam, he AN INTERVIEW WITH encourages American Muslims to IBRAHIM ABDUL - MATIN prioritize the protection of the planet by Justin Vogt in their private and public lives. He currently works as a policy adviser in New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Office of Sustainability and Long-Term Planning. A former football player at the University of Rhode Island, Abdul-Matin also appears regularly as a sports commentator on New York City’s National Public Radio affiliate. He spoke with the journalist Justin Vogt at his home in Brooklyn Heights. Both your parents grew up Episcopalian but converted to Islam.
Yes, they both joined the Nation of Islam, and that’s how they met. When Elijah Muhammad [who led the Nation of Islam for four decades] passed in 1975, they transitioned to Sunnism. The problem with the Nation of Islam was that it had a great message around empowerment, but it didn’t have a great understanding of the sunnah, the practice or 2 0 onearth
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During my senior year of college, I started to look at the environment and overconsumption and to target corporate abuse as the problem. Both capitalism and socialism define your value as a human being on what you can make or create or destroy or waste or consume. The beauty of Islam is that it provides a framework that is an antidote to that. I would argue that Islam shares this perspective with Christianity, Judaism, and other great faiths. If I claim to love God, then I should love his creations. So how do I live in that framework? After graduating, how did you put these beliefs into practice?
I worked for a time as an Outward Bound instructor. We were training young people to understand their relationship with the planet and to leave the place better than they found it. It was a hands-on experience, not theoretical. Then I worked with a group called the Active Element Foundation in New York City, where we developed a directory of youth organizations all over the United States. It was called the Future 500. I also
helped start a public high school, the Brooklyn Academy of Science and the Environment. Then I moved to California, where I did a mixture of national organizing work and training youth organizers. That’s where I met Van Jones [later an adviser to President Barack Obama on green jobs].
NRDC IN TOWN DONNA DE COSTANZO
Senior attorney specializing in energy issues in NRDC’s New York office Why is it important to focus on cities like New York in our efforts to address climate change? We need action at all levels of government to build a clean-energy economy. Various states and municipalities have been leading the way in this area, and New York’s greenhouse gas reduction targets and the steps it has taken to scale up energy efficiency in existing buildings are good examples. Cities like New York can make a big difference, not only in reducing their own emissions but in developing policies that can serve as models for other jurisdictions around the country— and the world. To read more about NRDC’s work in New York, visit onearth.org/article/ decostanzoqa
LEFT: PHOTOGRAPH FOR ONEARTH BY LILA GARNETT; RIGHT: ILLUSTRATION BY DAVID GOLDIN
the ways of the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him.
What led you to make the transition into city government?
I was basically like, the left has no idea what to do if it actually had to govern. If our guy got elected tomorrow, would we know how to run the sanitation department? Or water? Or waste? I applied to the National Urban Fellows program and got a full scholarship and came back to New York to go to grad school. My goal was to learn how to manage government institutions. After I graduated in 2008, I worked with the organization that Van had started and we pushed the Green Jobs Now campaign, which became a national campaign issue. We put out his book, The Green Collar Economy. Van said I should stay in California, but I can’t stand California. I need to be in New York.
dhism is a deen and atheism is a deen. There are many deens. In the American Muslim community it’s like a slang term in a way. People will be like, how is your deen? So it has a cool ring to it. What makes Islam especially congruent with environmentalism?
The part that resonates with me the most is where the Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, said that the earth is a mosque. Since everything on the planet is sacred, nothing can be debased. If I pray and my head touches a blade of grass, on the day of judgment that blade of grass will be
able to say, “He prayed here.” The wind will say, “I heard him praise God here.” Everything around us will be able to testify for and against us. So if I am a factory owner and I dump mercury in the lake, then that lake and the fish and everything around it will be able to testify against me on the day of judgment and say, “You polluted me. You poisoned me.” Islam also lays out a framework to explain why human beings can have a negative effect on the environment. There’s a passage in the Koran that says: “Corruption has appeared on the land and in the sea because of what the hands of
Tell me about your current job.
I work on Mayor Bloomberg’s sustainability agenda, which is called PlaNYC and is his vision for how to green New York City. It covers land use, housing, transportation, energy, a whole multitude of things. In the next 20 years, the city’s population is expected to grow by one million. The goal is to figure out how to improve our infrastructure to handle them all. It’s really a quality-of-life plan. My role is to make sure that we have community engagement in the process. We have tons of meetings with community groups, which involve a lot of education and a lot of listening. Recently, for example, we met with a group of faith leaders and talked about water. All faith traditions use water in some way: for Muslims, it’s for wudu, the ablutions we make before praying. So maintaining our water system is important for these communities. The title of your book is Green Deen. Can you explain that term?
Deen is an Arabic word that means a religion or path. It’s a way of life. So Christianity is a deen and Bud-
humans have wrought. This is in order that [Allah] give them a taste of the consequences of their misdeeds that perhaps they will return to the path of right guidance.” Right now seems like a difficult climate to be persuading Muslims to engage in political issues.
No, I think there’s a really great opportunity right now to say that Muslims are not just “the Other.” Muslims are already very much involved in the things that everyone else cares about. But I think the American Muslim community has largely been silent on environmental issues. This book was designed to be the first step in that conversation, and my hope is that much more qualified scholars will join in and take this further. To see if we can be a force for good—an example to ourselves first and foremost, but also because we’re America and America consumes five times as much as the rest of the world. Do you see any risk in encouraging people to base their political activities on religious convictions?
I wouldn’t think so. I think the greatest moments of transition in this country have been when communities of faith have taken up the mantle of social change. It might be scary, and people have died, but like Martin Luther King said, if you have nothing to die for, then you have nothing to live for.
RENT ME A TREE, SANTA
E
ACH YEAR, AMERICANS CUT DOWN MORE THAN 33 MILLION
Christmas trees. John Fogel has never liked that much. When he moved to Portland, Oregon, from central New York State almost two decades ago, he had this idea that, come Christmastime, he wouldn’t see people driving around with trees strapped to the top of their cars. “This is Oregon,” he says. “People love their trees.” Today he runs a business, appropriately named The Original Living Christmas Tree Company, that allows Portlanders to hang on to a Christmas tradition while keeping the trees alive. Portlanders pay $80 to $100 for one of his trees—still alive in a planter—to be delivered just before Christmas. On January 2, Fogel begins picking up the trees and delivering them to his landscaping clients, who enjoy paying kinder rates thanks to the subsidies provided by holiday renters.
The book is critical of corporations that profit from our reliance on fossil fuels. But you don’t say much about the Muslim leaders of states like Saudi Arabia, who play a vital role in sustaining that system.
I do think leaders in those places embody the idea where the representative of God says, “I’m going to take from the earth and not care what I do with it.” That’s a deep part of our Muslim tradition that we need to move away from. But I’m not from Saudi Arabia. I’m American, and I wanted to speak to my own people.
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Please Pass the Oregano
THE SOIL DOCTOR
Compost ferments in these industrial shipping containers.
THE VIRTUES OF HUMAN WASTE Sasha Kramer got a Ph.D. from Stanford University and went on to install toilets. Now her work may help Haiti deal with its food, health, and environmental woes.
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BY JOCELYN C. ZUCKERMAN
MAZING!” DECLARES SASHA
Kramer as she emerges from a small outdoor toilet in the Portau-Prince slum known as Cité Soleil. “It’s completely clean,” she says. “Come smell it!” Not the most enticing invitation (though the place does turn out to be surprisingly welcoming), nor would you expect latrines to be of such passionate interest to a 34-year-old American who looks as though she would be better suited to modeling yoga gear. But Kramer believes them to be absolutely a subject worth getting excited about. It was back in 2004, while pursuing her doctorate in ecology at Stanford, that the New York native first became preoccupied with human waste. “I wasn’t thinking about the poop as poop,” she explains. “I was thinking about it as nitrogen. It made sense to me that, if I’m eating all this nutrient-rich food, then I’m producing all this nutrient-rich waste, and there must be some way to kill the pathogens and reuse the nutrients.”
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Around the same time, Kramer began making trips to Haiti to volunteer as a human rights monitor in the aftermath of the coup that removed the country’s president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, from power. Eventually, she says, it occurred to her that “really the most pervasive human rights abuse was the poverty and the lack of access to basic services or to food.” When her own rudimentary accommodations left her in need of a toilet, she says, “it became clear to me how important it was, not just for health but for dignity.” And so in 2006, Ph.D. in hand, Kramer and a friend cofounded SOIL (Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods) and moved to Cap Haïtien, in the north of the ecologically devastated country, to begin building public toilets whose waste they planned to channel into agriculture. When the earthquake hit last January, Oxfam asked SOIL to build toilets in the displaced-persons camps that had begun to dot Port-au-Prince, the ravaged capital. “This is where we built our first toilet,” says Kramer, navigating the muddy walkways between
to combat climate change, most scientists explore things like clean energy or efficient vehicles. Not Alexander Hristov. He raided the kitchen and took the oregano out to the barn. Microorganisms in the rumen—a compartment in the stomach of cows and other ruminants—break down feed into digestible components, producing methane, a gas that traps heat 21 times more effectively than carbon dioxide. All told, raising livestock produces more methane than any other single human activity—80 million metric tons of it annually. And animals on high-fiber, nutrient-poor diets produce more methane than others. Hristov figured there must be something he could feed cows to reduce methane production. The benefits would be more than environmental; making methane uses energy that could go toward producing milk, for example. His team screened more than 200 products, from onions to lavender oil, mixing them with rumen contents to test their effects on digestion and fermentation (what happens in the rumen). When oregano showed promise, the researchers added about a pound of it to each cow’s 55 pounds of daily feed, measuring the gas that came out both ends. The results were encouraging: methane production was reduced by up to 40 percent. The researchers aim to isolate the beneficial compound in oregano to develop better feed products—a winwin for farmers and the environment. —GENEVRA PITTMAN
LEFT: PHOTOGRAPH FOR ONEARTH BY RAMIN TALAIE; OPPOSITE, TOP: SHUTTERSTOCK; BOTTOM: PHOTOGRAPHY BY MYKO PHOTOGRAPHY, INC.
WHEN LOOKING FOR WAYS
the tents of the camp in her plastic flip-flops. With a Haitian toddler perched on her hip, she stops every few feet to kiss another cheek and banter animatedly in Creole. SOIL carpenters have built more than 200 of these simple composting latrines, she explains; once a week, collectors pick up a wastefilled 15-gallon drum from each station and replace it with a fresh one filled with aromatic sawdust (used for “flushing”). The drums are sent to one of three composting facilities around the city. “Come on up,” Kramer calls from the top of a waste-filled shipping container at the main composting site. She opens a
manhole she had custom-built into the top of the container and sticks in a two-foot-long thermometer. “That’s hot!” she declares proudly. Four to six months and a couple of simple steps later, the waste will have decomposed completely and will be pathogen free. “You get a really nice fertilizer,” Kramer says. SOIL collects some thousands of gallons of waste a week, which will eventually yield the same amount of fertilizer. Kramer is now in talks with the United States Agency for International Development to distribute the fertilizer to farmers at minimal cost. In the meantime, several other nongov-
ernmental organizations working in Haiti are looking to copy SOIL’s ecological sanitation, or eco-san, model (Kramer is happy to hand over the plans). She hopes to set up community-run businesses that will employ locals to collect and treat waste and, in turn, profit from fertilizer sales. The quick-to-laugh free spirit acknowledges that toilets are maybe not the sexiest sell on the planet. “But if you go into a community and say, ‘You can be a part of changing the agricultural landscape of this country, you can be a part of fighting hunger through using these toilets,’ ” she says, “people get really excited.”
YOUR RIDE IS WAITING YOUR ASSIGNMENT (AND YOU WILL CHOOSE TO ACCEPT IT) IS TO TAKE THIS TRUCK AND TURN IT into a living room. That’s pretty much what the celebrated 3-D visual artist Kevin O’Callaghan told his students at the School of Visual Arts in New York City. He gave his 22 students two weeks to find one aging, gasguzzling monster truck, buy it on the cheap (which they did, on Craigslist, for $500), and work collaboratively to redistribute and recycle parts into objects and installations that would heighten the viewers’ consciousness about consumption and waste. The students left nothing behind but the dipstick. So test yourself, dear reader: can you identify the fender, the exhaust pipe, the tire, and the driver’s door in this picture?
Calling Superman HERE’S HOW TO SINGLE-
handedly save the planet from climate change: play Fate of the World, a computer game developed by the company Red Redemption. The game, which will be released to the public in early 2011, puts policy decisions in the hands of players who must manage environmental, economic, and political challenges to prevent climate change and resource depletion. Gobion Rowlands, the company’s chairman, says the game inspires players to think critically about the ramifications of a changing climate. “Every decision you make has a distinct impact,” he says. The game “gives you control over what could otherwise be a very impersonal issue.” Players choose a specific mission, such as rainforest preservation. The challenge is to save land from development while preventing climate change from destroying forest life. To maintain power, players negotiate issues from nuclear armament to hunger and oil spills. The game’s climate model was developed by scientists at the University of Oxford, and Red Redemption also has a climate scientist on staff— Rowlands’s wife, Hannah. Her research suggests gaming can affect players’ attitudes toward the climate crisis. “The game has real-world impacts in addition to entertainment impacts,” Gobion Rowlands says. —G.P.
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T
POWER PLANTS HAT WE’VE EMBRACED GREEN AS THE
color of energy efficiency is a bit of a paradox. Granted, green is everywhere outdoors, courtesy of the pigment chlorophyll, a remarkable technology that, by harnessing solar energy, has enabled photosynthetic life for 3 billion years. Chlorophyll excels at absorbing and utilizing light in the blue and red portions of the electromagnetic spectrum— but the rest, including green light, is largely ignored, reflected, squandered. Green, in nature, is the color of extravagant waste. “The light that chlorophyll doesn’t like is the color we see,” notes Robert Blankenship, a photosynthesis expert at Washington University in St. Louis. That may seem like a glaring loss of potential, but chlorophyll makes up for it in other ways. Blankenship has been working with a team of Australian biologists who recently discovered a type of chlorophyll that can gather energy from infrared light, which lies below human vision and, it was thought, photosynthetic capacity. As humankind strives to emulate the zero-cost, low-impact way in which plants harness sunlight—a business that clearly still holds surprises—the subvisible turns out, fortunately, to be illuminating. In the photosynthesis factory, chlorophyll has two jobs. First, it absorbs the sun’s energy, which it then converts into chemical energy for the plant to use and store. Several types of chlorophyll are known, each varying slightly in molecular structure and function. The most common, chlorophyll-a, is found in all plants and cyanobacteria (singlecelled blue-green algae) and does the core work of converting photons
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BY ALAN BURDICK
into food. Most plants also use chlorophyll-a to absorb, or “harvest”, sunlight. Some, though, harvest light with chlorophyll-b, which absorbs light at slightly shorter wavelengths (though still largely in the red and blue parts of the spectrum), while others use chlorophyll-c. The infrared spectrum (wavelengths longer than 700 nanometers) was thought to lack sufficient energy to drive photosynthesis—until 1996, when biologists confirmed the existence of chlorophyll-d, which has a peak absorption of about 710 nanometers. This pigment turns up in marine cyanobacteria, including some that live on the underside of other photosynethetic structures, gleaning the thin light that filters down. Min Chen, a biologist at the University of Sydney, was hunting for chlorophyll-d when she stumbled into an altogether new variety. Out in the tidal pools of Western Australia are odd, ancient structures called stromatolites; they look like misshapen rocks but, when cut open, reveal themselves as multilayered colonies of cyanobacteria. The most deeply buried (and thus darkest) layers, Chen figured, might harbor microbial employers of chlorophyll-d. She was right—and “as a bonus,” she says, she also found evidence of chlorophyll-f, a pigment capable of absorbing light of 725 nanometers. The discovery is “extremely exciting,” says Michael Strano, a chemical engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Older photovoltaic cells, which employ silicon substrates, and newer technologies that enlist light-absorbing dyes, can already harvest some light from the infrared spectrum. Still, the solar industry is constantly scouring nature for “good absorbers,” Strano says, and the biochemistry of the infrared chlorophylls will surely interest chemical engineers, either as a model or as a material to be incorporated into future technologies. Yet even as we model machines after plants, we tweak plants to serve us as machines do. It doesn’t take much for a cell to convert chlorophyll-a to chlorophyll-d. Recently Blankenship and Chen identified the gene responsible; they are now working to insert it into another photosynthetic organism to extend its—and ultimately our—light-gathering ability. The world of genetically modified plants is already so weird: some rice contains daffodil genes to boost its vitamin A content; potatoes carry fish genes to better tolerate the cold. Why not engineer plants to harvest infrared light? One can imagine plants that are photosynthetically tiered, like stromatolites: the upper leaves harvest sunlight with chlorophyll-a, while the lower ones employ chlorophyll-d or -f to catch “waste” light. Crops could be grown in denser stands, to increase yield; biofuels could be made more efficient. “If one could insert it into plants and make it functional,” Blankenship says, “you could gain access to about 10 percent additional energy from the solar spectrum.” The biochemistry of infrared sheds deeper light as well. That living cells can so easily convert chlorophyll-a to chlorophyll-d, and probably to -f too, suggests that the latter pigments evolved sometime after the former, as life adapted to occupy the murky niches. Human industry is at a similar juncture: to sustain ourselves, we must begin to look beyond what we merely see and make better use of darkness. If the single cells of the world can swing it, surely we can too. Alan Burdick, a contributing editor and regular columnist for OnEarth, is the author of Out of Eden (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
ILLUSTRATION BY JESSE LEFKOWITZ
the synthesist
Make Someone Happy. (And send the Earth a little joy at the same time.)
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CREATING THE NEW SCHOOL OF COOL
A
BY LYNNE PEEPLES
S I WALK DOWN THE GREEN-
and-gold-painted science wing at Redmond High School, I see a tall, dark-haired student standing outside a classroom door. “Hello,” says Micah Zeitz. “Come on in.” It’s late May and Zeitz is a senior, which means that in a few
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weeks he’ll graduate with 500 or so other students in Redmond High’s class of 2010. Today is the last day of class for Independent Science Research, a course developed by 51-year-old teacher Mike Town. I grew up in Redmond, Washington, a suburb of Seattle and home of Microsoft, and this is my alma mater. The school is the secondlargest source of carbon pollution in town, trailing only the Microsoft campus. That fact is not lost on Zeitz and his classmates, who have spent the better part of their time in Town’s course breaking down the factors that contribute to the school’s carbon footprint and overall environmental impact, devising detailed plans to reduce that impact, and putting those plans into action. Seven students are enrolled in this year’s class, and they have embraced the project that is central to the course—the Cool School Challenge—with the dedication Town hoped it would inspire when he founded it three years ago. The challenge has since been adopted by more than 70 schools as far away as Dubai, and teachers from at least 150 other schools have attended workshops that prepare them to implement the program on their own. Zeitz leads me into the classroom, where five other students are gathered around a beat-up beige sofa. Town, wearing a long-sleeve purple shirt with trees printed on it, paces in front of the chalkboard and eventually settles in behind his desk, allowing his students to walk me through what they’ve been up to this semester. Jeremy Dance, also a senior, fills me in on the core component of the Cool School Challenge: schoolwide carbon auditing. “First we go into each teacher’s room and conduct a pre-audit,” he explains. The students survey the basics: lighting, appliances, heating, and transportation to and from school. Back in their own classroom, they plan their audit, which involves returning to each classroom to take more precise measurements. Zeitz then shows me a tool called a Kill A Watt, which the class uses to measure electricity consumption. “With one of these Kill A Watts we are able to get an accurate read of how much you can save, dollar- and CO2-wise, if you unplug a monitor, projector, or printer or leave it in sleep mode,” he says. Kill A Watt’s manufacturer sells several models, including one that looks like a power strip with a digital display that shows you how much power is being consumed by whatever appliance has been plugged in. “We found out that some things use a lot more energy than we thought,” Zeitz says. He points to one of the old overhead projectors that, I remember, hummed loudly throughout my high school days. After the students gather energy consumption data, they run the numbers to identify potential savings. “Then we have the teachers look at our results and tell us what they can do to improve,” Zeitz says. The students encourage pledges of at least 2,000 pounds in carbon cuts from each of the more than 60 teachers at the school. In response, some teachers and their students have made an effort to make sure that computer monitors are shut off after class, while others have focused on setting up carpools for teachers who travel long distances to get to school. All told, the Cool School audit—combined with school-wide, studentrun composting and carpooling programs and the building’s newly installed solar panels—is delivering significant savings. Last year alone,
ILLUSTRATION BY DANIEL KRALL
living green
these initiatives saved more than $10,000 in waste-removal costs and on that work outside the confines of the school, conducting audits for $30,000 in electric utility expenses and eliminated 230,000 pounds of the city’s firehouses and even at the Washington State Department carbon dioxide emissions. The school now emits about half as much of Ecology. Surprisingly, the students found that the Department carbon as it did when I was a student there. of Ecology was throwing out so much recyclable and compostable The bell for lunch rings, students shuffle out, and I follow Zeitz and material that of the 24 bags of trash they audited, a full 20 could have two classmates, Laci Castro and Sarah Kim, outside into the bustling been diverted from the landfill. courtyard beside the cafeteria to see Redmond High’s 30 solar panels— Last April, Harriet Sanford, president of the National Education a number that has grown to 45 since my visit. Association Foundation, came to Redmond High to present Town As we stare up at the 2-by-3-foot crystalline silicon panels gleaming with the group’s inaugural Green Prize in Public Education. “Town under rare Pacific Northwest sunshine, Zeitz explains that the cheaper, allows his students to be as much a driver of the teaching and learning thin-film panels wouldn’t work well in this setting. The roof’s not right, process as he is,” she says. “And they do all the work themselves. As a he notes. “These are more expensive to begin with but produce a lot result, their behavior changed. Their families’ behavior changed. Their more power. They end up powering most classrooms in the school.” school’s behavior changed.” When Town walked into the auditorium to Zeitz, who I now notice is wearaccept his award, Sanford recalls, ing a Google T-shirt, could tell his the students “cheered as if he were fellow students as much as they’d a rock star.” “In this school, not only is global ever want to know about these “I had intended to do a unit this climate change accepted and known solar panels’ technical specificaspring on global warming using acbut people actually understand it,” tions. And indeed, at this school tivities out of the book. Then I heard he would have a receptive audiabout Cool School,” recalls Anna Micah Zeitz says. “It’s part of life.” ence. In addition to supervising the Sansone, who was then teaching independent study course, Town ninth-grade science at Orr Academy teaches AP Environmental Science. Zeitz has taken it, as have all of his High School in Chicago. “The program gets students to realize these independent study classmates. In fact, about half of all students take topics are real-world issues, which makes for more dynamic learning.” the course, which was introduced the year after I graduated in 1998. At the end of my visit, Town, who sat back and let his students Town’s most recent offering, Environmental Design and Sustainability, show off their work for the first half of the day, invited me back into teaches students practical skills that apply to green construction and his classroom to talk. Daylight streamed through the windows. (Town urban planning. usually keeps the overhead lights turned off.) As I slid into one of “In this school, not only is global climate change accepted and known the student desks, Town said that Redmond is now home to 50,000 but people actually understand it,” Zeitz tells me. “It’s part of life.” people. In most small towns, with populations below 10,000 or so, the Throughout the semester, Zeitz has become something of a pro high school easily ranks number one in carbon emissions. Town told at carbon auditing, even working the Cool School carbon calculator me that he was riding a local bike trail when the inspiration for Cool into an interactive Excel worksheet with additional fields for emis- School struck. He and his wife had been discussing former Seattle sions from sources that are unique to Redmond High. He and his mayor Greg Nickels’s challenge to all U.S. cities to reduce their carbon classmates have become young ambassadors and advocates for a new emissions in accordance with the Kyoto Protocol. “I thought, what a way of thinking about sustainability and the environment. They carry great opportunity to make students part of the solution while teaching them math and science,” he says. “And the kids would then disseminate the message at home and throughout their lives.” SHORT TAKE Since we met in May, Town has traded in his solar-powered house in Redmond for a high-rise apartment in Washington, D.C. He is taking a yearlong leave with his wife, a junior high science teacher, to work on science education policy as part of a fellowship funded through THE COOL SCHOOL CHALLENGE CAN BE the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy. administered by anyone your school designates to be If all the 70-plus schools currently implementing the challenge are able to do what Redmond High has, about 15 million pounds of carbon what’s called a Challenge Coach—a science, math, or dioxide could be cut from the atmosphere every year. But the broader other teacher; a school administrator; or the leader of trend—the shift in students’ thinking about sustainability—may be even a student organization. Cool School’s online course mamore promising. About 10 percent of American high schools now offer AP terials are tailored for secondary or elementary grade Environmental Science, up from zero 15 years ago. Town would prefer that the number be 100 percent. “My big dream is for environmental scilevels, and each set includes how-to instructions for ence to be as standard a course as chemistry, physics, or biology,” he says. conducting classroom audits and measuring CO2 emisAs far as the students go, Zeitz has graduated and is now studying sions, as well as suggestions for reducing emissions. mechanical engineering at Northwestern University. He hopes to join The Cool School Web site also offers additional online Town’s growing list of graduates who are working on everything from charging stations for hybrid cars to methane recovery in landfills to resources for those who want to take the challenge environmental law. Zeitz says he has his sights set on green technology, even further. Visit coolschoolchallenge.org to get started. perhaps wind or solar power, or alternative-energy cars, something that “makes sense from both a moral and an economic standpoint.”
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EVERY DROP COUNTS A “fog catcher” extracts moisture from the garúa, the sea mist that blankets Lima for half the year.
By George Black
PERU’S LONG-TERM SURVIVAL DEPENDS ON WATER FROM THE GLACIERS OF THE HIGH ANDES. THE PROBLEM IS THAT ALL THAT ICE WILL SOON BE GONE.
Life and death in a
dry land PHOTOGRAPHS BY DIANE COOK AND LEN JENSHEL
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A
T THE CUSP OF THE SEASONS IN LATE May, as the austral summer gave way to
winter, something unusual happened in Lima, the capital of Peru. It rained. Although perhaps even that statement needs to be qualified. There was precipitation, the thinnest of drizzles, just enough to leave a slick of moisture on the pavement. I was standing on a concrete barrier above the Río Rímac, which supplies the city with four-fifths of its water, in the company of an engineer named Oscar Sánchez, a 30-year veteran of the state water authority, SEDAPAL. Nearby, a group of neatly uniformed schoolchildren were learning how the flow of the Rímac is handled here at the city’s gigantic water treatment plant, La Atarjea—removal of solid waste, filtration, chlorination, and so forth. Sánchez nodded approvingly as the kids asked questions. “People have to start learning where their water comes from and how scarce it is here,” he said. “It’s not just a question of turning on the faucet.” Lima gets less than half an inch of precipitation a year, he told me. Most of this comes in the form of the garúa, a dense sea mist that for the next six months would envelop this already unprepossessing city in a clammy, gray murk. But this is only the beginning of Peru’s climatic weirdness— and its global significance. The source of the garúa is the Humboldt Current, a powerful flow of cold water that moves from Antarctica up the western edge of South America. When warm tropical air meets this current, the result is a blanket of water vapor. Every few years, at unpredictable intervals, the Humboldt Current reverses direction—the so-called El Niño Southern Oscillation, or ENSO. (El Niño—The Child—was given its name by Peruvian fishermen because it often occurs around Christmastime.) Weather patterns are turned on their head, often with devastating effects: as warm water pools in the ocean, Peru’s coastal desert is swamped by torrential rains, and the normally wet highlands are wracked by drought. To complicate matters further, a related phenomenon called La Niña turns the ocean current abnormally cold; when this happens, the aridity of the coast increases while the sierra gets heavier rain and snow. The impact of these turbulent events is not just local. The onset of El Niño in Peru affects the intensity of Asian monsoons and Atlantic hurricanes as well as rainfall in places as far apart as Australia, Tibet, and the Nile Valley. Some scientists even believe that El Niño cycles explain the “seven years of plenteousness” and “seven years of famine” in Genesis. Understanding El Niño, in other words—and particularly the millennia of evidence left behind in Peru’s glaciers and interpreted by an American scientist named Lonnie Thompson—gives us unique insights into the past, present, and likely future of our global climate.
CITY OF THE KINGS From our vantage point above
the river, Sánchez gestured upstream into the garúa. The Rímac rises in the icy peaks of the Cordillera Central, he explained, at about 16,000 feet. On its steep 100-mile rush to Lima, the modest river must serve the needs of countless farms, villages, and small towns and meet the demands of the copper, gold, zinc, and silver mines that are Peru’s principal source of exports—and of water pollution. In addition, a string of hydropower plants on the Rímac supplies Lima with two-thirds of its electricity. These plants have no storage reservoirs, Sánchez explained, and this, coupled with profligate water use and poor management, explains why 40 percent of the meager flow of the Rímac ends up in the ocean without being captured for human needs. Upstream, a swirl of water from a deep holding pool was being channeled into the treatment area. Downstream, this being the tail end of the dry season, there was nothing but a broken shelf of concrete and a few stagnant puddles in a dry bed of gravel, like a dilapidated version of the Los Angeles River. Beyond the puddles, invisible in the fog, the city stretched away for more than 10 miles to the Pacific. Francisco Pizarro and his Spanish conquistadores established Lima, or La Ciudad de los Reyes, as it was first known, in 1535, in one of the world’s driest deserts. By the eve of World War II, Lima was a city of 300,000. Since then, successive waves of rural migrants have swelled that number to nine million. Almost a quarter live in vast, sprawling shantytowns, the asentamientos humanos, most of which have no running water. In the next quarter-century, at the current rate of growth, Lima’s population will balloon to 15 million. Demand for water will double. Two-thirds of Peru’s population of 28 million live on the arid western side of the Andes, but this area has only 2 percent of the country’s water, and that amount is steadily diminishing. Whether this dilemma remains just insanely stressful or threatens the very viability of the country will depend largely on the fate of the glaciers of the high Andes. The Andes contain 99 percent of the world’s tropical glaciers (which sounds at first like an oxymoron, but altitude is everything). Peru alone accounts for almost three-quarters of them. These glaciers are not only an indispensable water source, storing and releasing the precious liquid on a seasonal cycle, nourishing depleted rivers during the long dry season; they are also an invaluable data bank on climate change. As early as 1943, the Peruvian glaciologist Jorge Broggi theorized that the first signs of glacial retreat were related to a warming climate. That correlation is now beyond argument. According to the latest government estimates, between 1970 and 2006 fully one-third of the ice cover disappeared, and the rate of loss has increased.
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Within 10 years, all the ice below 5,000 meters (16,400 feet)—which includes virtually all of the glaciers that feed the Río Rímac and Lima— is likely to be gone. This pattern of accelerating retreat is occurring in every glaciated area in the world, from Antarctica to the Tibetan Plateau, from the European Alps to the North American Rockies. Rising temperatures will be accompanied by radical changes in annual precipitation. In some parts of the Andes, rain and snowfall will decline by as much as 20 percent, greatly reducing the flow of the rivers that run to the parched Pacific coast. As the glaciers melt away, however, there will be a temporary illusion of bounty that will tempt water users into reckless assumptions about the future—making, for example, extravagant new investments in unsustainable agriculture. By 2050, the government predicts, Peru may have lost 40 percent of its water. But enough of statistics. Why does any of this matter to the rest of us? Isn’t the future of Peru, as the British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain famously said of Hitler’s attack on Czechoslovakia, “a quarrel in a faraway country about a people of whom we know nothing”? The answer is no. The assault of climate change on Peru affects all of us. To see why, however, requires a journey not just to the thirsty slums of Lima and the snow peaks of the Andes but to the unlikeliest of places: a freezing basement in Columbus, Ohio; the ruins of a sixth-century pyramid; and the produce aisle of your local supermarket.
MAP BY JOE LEMONNIER; ILLUSTRATION BY BRUCE MORSER
IN THE DEATH ZONE If Lonnie Thompson was not
recognized as one of the world’s great climate scientists (technically he is a paleoclimatologist), he would surely be considered one of the world’s great explorers. He is said to have logged more hours in the planet’s oxygen-thin “death zone”—elevations above 18,000 feet—than any other human being. At 62, he continues to ascend to these places at least once a year, often for weeks at a stretch and sometimes for months, while supervising the transport by porters and mules of tons of ice-drilling equipment and managing teams of often fractious colleagues, not to mention coping with his crippling asthma. Stepping up to the podium at a seminar at Ohio State University in Columbus in late March, Lonnie (his modesty of manner seems to encourage everyone to call him that) was introduced by his wife, Ellen Mosley-Thompson, who is the director of the university’s Byrd Polar Research Center. She too is an expert on ice, but while Lonnie’s specialty is tropical glaciers, hers is Antarctica and Greenland. “That combination has worked well for us, especially while we were raising our daughter,” Lonnie told me later. “It meant that one of us was always home.” Lonnie is a man of medium height, with receding hair and rimless glasses. He speaks softly, with strong remnants of his native West Virginia accent. His manner is somewhat owlish, with flashes of dry humor. Today he was wearing an unremarkable gray suit. A row of pens and a pocket protector would not have seemed out of place. He conforms to no one’s idea of Indiana Jones on ice. I alluded to this, diplomatically I hoped, when his talk was over. He grinned and suggested that since our schedules in Peru would not coincide, I might look at a couple of documentaries of his work. I did so later. There he was, crouched in an ice cave at 20,000 feet with several colleagues, wearing mountain gear and a watch cap. None of them had shaved in a while. The image brought to mind something that was once said about glacier fanatics by a member of Lonnie’s inner circle of collaborators, the aptly named Australian Keith Mountain:
NRDC THE DRYING OF THE WEST
BARRY NELSON Leader of NRDC’s work on California water issues and expert on the water management implications of global warming.
How widespread are the impacts of climate change on water resources today, and what are we likely to see in the future? Disappearing glaciers are the most visible. Other likely impacts include decreased precipitation and desertification in some regions, more severe droughts and greater storm intensity, impacts on fish and wildlife, decreased water supply and hydropower production, diminished groundwater supplies, greater demand for irrigation water, and sea level rise. Where are these problems most evident in the United States? The most dramatic warning signs may be in the Colorado River Basin. Seventy-five years ago, Hoover Dam was completed on the Colorado River. It’s where engineers learned how to tame even the largest rivers. But after a dry decade, the water level behind the dam has hit the lowest level ever. If the reservoir level drops another 8 feet, water users in the Southwest will face mandatory shortages. Another 25 feet and the dam’s massive turbines could stop generating power. What can we do to meet these challenges? Fortunately, creative water managers are finding new supplies to tap into. For example, in 1991, 95 percent of San Diego County’s supply was imported from the Colorado and the San Francisco Bay–Delta. But San Diego recognizes the limits on these systems and has been investing in new tools. By 2020, despite a growing population, they plan to meet 70 percent of their water needs from agricultural and urban conservation, water recycling, improved groundwater management, and other local strategies. The City of Los Angeles has a similar plan. Together, water efficiency, water recycling, improved groundwater management, and capturing urban storm water can produce as much water as California pumps from the Colorado and the Bay–Delta combined. Almost 25 years ago, NRDC alumnus Marc Reisner published a groundbreaking book, Cadillac Desert, which chronicled dam-building efforts across the West. Yes, Marc’s book exposed taxpayer scams, political maneuvering, and environmental disasters. But he also couldn’t help but admire the imagination and drive of the “water buffaloes” who led the dam-building era. Now we’re entering a new era in the West, with a new generation of leaders designing technology and efficiency-based solutions to meet our future needs.
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DOLLARS FROM THE DESERT Asparagus, avocados, peppers, mangoes, and other export crops thrive amid the sand dunes of northern Peru.
“We’re not pretty. We smell a lot and we have horrible bodily habits.” Lonnie’s core philosophy is simply expressed. To discover something new, you go to a place where no one has ever been before; once you get there and look around, you are certain to make new discoveries. His goal in choosing these perilous work sites is to gather and analyze as much high-altitude ice as he can while the glaciers are still there and he still has the stamina. His findings will then form a mosaic with parallel discoveries from tree rings, lake and ocean sediments, coral reefs, speleotherms (mineral deposits in caves), and other so-called climate surrogates, which cumulatively will give us the fullest possible picture of the world’s climate and its likely future. In his presentation at the Byrd Center, Lonnie described the three basic indicators of the health of a glacier. The first and most easily measured is the shrinking of its surface area. The second is something called mass balance, which calculates the relationship between the accumulation of ice and its ablation—that is, the loss of volume through melting and through the transformation of ice into a gaseous state without passing first through a liquid stage. The third indicator is the thinning of the ice from the top down. Unlike the loss of surface area, mass balance and thinning can’t be measured with satellites and aerial photography; you have to delve into the ice itself. “Thinning, in particular, is absolutely critical,” Lonnie told me. “On Kilimanjaro, for example, we found that the glacier is losing as much through thinning as it is through retreat at the margins. So it’s actually even worse than it seems.” He gave his audience some of the most salient statistics about Peru’s vanishing ice, showing dramatic before-and-after slides that depicted the recession of particular glaciers over time. And he shared a favorite quotation, by the University of Michigan geophysicist Henry Pollack: “Ice asks no questions, presents no arguments, reads no newspapers, listens to no debates. It is not burdened by ideology and carries no political baggage as it changes from solid to liquid. It just melts.” It does, however, generate all manner of questions, arguments, and political debates. Lonnie is one of a small but growing number of glaciologists who have come to believe that the study of climate change has to move out of the bastion of pure science. All kinds of social forces—agribusiness, industry, subsistence farmers, energy utilities, city residents—lay claim to the water that drips from the glaciers, and their demands will escalate as the supply diminishes. Already, half of all the social conflicts that are serious enough to be recorded by Peru’s ombudsman’s office derive from disputes over scarce water.
THE ROSETTA STONE When Lonnie first proposed
taking his research to the Andes, other climate scientists told him, in suitably polite academic terms, that he was mad and that he would ruin his career. The consensus was that only the Arctic and the Antarctic would yield significant evidence about climate. There was no ice old enough in the tropics, they said, nothing that went back to the last ice age, between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago. The relatively stable yearround temperatures of the tropical zone, as opposed to the dramatic seasonal temperature swings at the poles, would not provide any useful insights. Lonnie stood those assumptions on their ear. He first visited Peru in 1974 as a graduate student, almost serendipitously, when a tiny grant became available from the Office of Polar Programs at the National Science Foundation, which hadn’t spent down all of its annual budget. “They asked what I could do for $7,000,” he told me with a laugh. “I said, well, we can probably get WINTER 2011
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there.” And when he did get there, he experienced the scientist’s equivalent of falling in love with the place. Peru’s glaciers have a number of special characteristics. Seasonal changes in the tropics are not a matter of hot and cold, but of wet and dry. Therefore, in contrast to the polar ice caps, accumulation and ablation do not alternate according to the seasons; they occur simultaneously. Andean glaciers are exquisitely sensitive to climate change because their margins are constantly at or near the melting point. So the consequences of warming temperatures will be more immediately visible in the Andes than at the poles, and they will of course affect many more people. Lonnie’s reading of Peruvian ice cores brought many revelations. For climate scientists, ice cores are a little like tree rings. Once the ice has been chopped up into cylindrical sections, each one resembles a layer cake in which individual years can be distinguished. The analyst looks at four things: the amount of snow that fell; the airborne dust that settled on the ice during dry periods; gas bubbles trapped in the ice (which show, among other things, greenhouse gas concentrations); and the ratio of “heavy” to “light” oxygen isotopes, which reveals the temperature of the air when the ice was formed. Lonnie calls the Quelccaya ice cap in southern Peru “the Rosetta Stone of tropical glaciers,” and during the past 35 years he has visited it dozens of times. Comparing the cores he drilled on Quelccaya in 1991 with those he had extracted in 1976, he discovered that the record of annual changes in the top 65 feet of ice had been wiped out by melting, something that had not occurred in the previous 1,500 years. On one expedition to Quelccaya, Lonnie and some colleagues were sitting around one day in their tent. His close friend César Portocarrero, a Peruvian glacial engineer, was relaxing, smoking a cigarette. (“You really must spend some time with César when you’re in Peru,” Lonnie said, and I did.) Another longtime collaborator, the Russian glaciologist Vladimir Mikhalenko, was there too. Lonnie went outside to walk around and came upon an area of slush and rock that had been exposed by recent melting. He picked something up, something brown, and took it back to the tent in a plastic bag. “What’s that?” Vladimir asked sardonically. “Cow shit?” “No,” Lonnie replied. “It’s a leaf.” He took the leaf back to Ohio and had it carbon-dated. It was 5,200 years old, indicating that rising temperatures had caused the ice to recede farther than at any time in more than five millennia. The other critical cores came from Huascarán, more than 500 miles to the north. Huascarán is a 22,205-foot behemoth in the Cordillera Blanca, home to the greatest concentration of tropical glaciers in the world, and the cores Lonnie drilled there in 1993 went back all the way to the last ice age. Because they were so deep and densely compressed, he told me, it was hard to see year-by-year distinctions much before about AD 1740. “You have to understand the difference between depth and time,” he said. The great significance of the Huascarán cores was their extreme age—19,000 years. If the evidence from Quelccaya hadn’t shaken the old consensus of the polar climatologists, this did. In fact, as Lonnie studied the ice from Huascarán, he began to form the conviction that tropical temperatures were a key, perhaps even the key, to understanding the forces that had driven global climate change. Comparing the evidence from Quelccaya and Huascarán with his findings from other parts of the world, Lonnie came to another remarkable 3 4 onearth
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conclusion. At distinct intervals throughout history, the entire planet had been blanketed in dust from prolonged droughts. Parallel discoveries by archaeologists showed that one civilization after another had collapsed at these times. Between about 2200 BC and AD 1500 there was evidence of traumatic climate events on a roughly 400-year cycle, coinciding with, for example, massive crop failures in the Middle East and Asia, the loss of half the territory of the Roman Empire, and the disintegration of the Mayan civilization of Central America. At the risk of stating the obvious, what has happened before can happen again. If Lima is at risk, so too are Los Angeles and Cairo—and so, in fact, is any desert society where the demand for water will outrun the capacity of the earth to provide it. “All the evidence is right here at Ohio State, down in the basement at the Byrd Center,” Lonnie said. “We’ve set up two large storage rooms at –30 degrees Celsius and three processing rooms, where the cores are cut before they go to the labs for analysis, at –10 degrees. Each of those rooms has a big natural gas generator in case the power
THE ICE EXPERTS César Portocarrero, above, has worked for decades to prevent catastrophic glacial outburst floods from the Laguna Parón. Lonnie Thompson, right, inspects Ohio State’s huge collection of tropical ice cores.
fails, so the ice can be kept cold. Each room is also wired to a central 24-hour alarm system, and an alarm sounds if the temperature goes outside the range we need. “We have more than 7,000 meters of ice cores here,” he went on, the latest being 88 meters from Papua New Guinea, where Lonnie spent two months in the summer of 2010, and 195 meters from Hualcán in Peru’s Cordillera Blanca, drilled a year earlier. “This is the only tropical collection on earth,” he said, “and we have to store it for the future, because its value goes up each year as the glaciers disappear in the real world.”
THE DECAPITATOR
The implicit message in all this: if you want to understand the future, study the past, and that was what I wanted to do next. After two dreary, garúa-bound days in Lima, I headed north through Peru’s coastal desert. It is a peculiar place.
THIS PAGE: ©THOMAS NASH 2009. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
There are miles of rubble fields that look like some vast, abandoned construction site. Then come miles of tall, rippled sand dunes that resemble the Sahara. And at frequent intervals, the desert is spotted with the detritus of pre-Columbian civilizations. The more time Lonnie spent in Peru, the more his ideas about climate change and social collapse illuminated the history of these ancient empires. The ice cores showed that Peru’s highland and desert civilizations had alternated in a kind of cultural seesaw over four millennia, lasting until the arrival of the conquistadores in the 16th century. As highland cultures fell, coastal cultures rose, and vice versa. In the context of this climate history, the most notable of the desert civilizations may have been the Moche, who controlled a coastal strip more than 300 miles long from the ocean to the western face of the Andes and dominated a string of river valleys. The largest of these rivers was the glacier-fed Río Santa. The Moche diverted the waters into a complex of irrigation canals to cultivate fields of maize, peanuts,
lima beans, sweet potatoes, peppers, quinoa, and squash. They were present in this area from about AD 100, dominated it for about 500 years, and then began to fall apart after a string of catastrophic climate events. By 750, the Moche civilization was literally dead and buried. But what it left behind is extraordinary. The Moche ruins are dominated by two huge pyramids, a few miles south of the modern city of Trujillo. The Huaca de la Luna (Temple of the Moon) and Huaca del Sol (Temple of the Sun) stand about a quarter of a mile apart on the desert floor. Between the two, archaeologists have uncovered a large urban complex, where a rigidly stratified society was ruled by a caste of warrior-priests. The most recent excavations have revealed multiple levels of the Huaca de la Luna, each with extensive mural reliefs bearing much of their original pigmentation and showing how the Moche lived. It appears to have been a culture of extreme cruelty. Endlessly repeated on these walls are diamond-shaped images of a bug-eyed god known as the Decapitator, a terrifying face with ferocious teeth, part human and part octopus. Reliefs and pottery show naked captives tied together with ropes around the neck; prisoners ritually defleshed, be-
headed, and dismembered; victims tied to stakes and left to the birds, which peck at their eyes and genitals. Even more relevant to the collapse of the Moche is the recent disinterment of the skeletons of many of the victims, which were encased in mud. Archaeologists infer from this that they were sacrificed during El Niño events, either as a propitiatory gesture to the gods who had cursed the Moche with floods or as a mark of gratitude for the rare gift of rainfall. Lonnie’s ice cores indicate that around AD 600, decades of catastrophic flooding obliterated everything but the two great pyramids, burying the fields and irrigation canals under sand, and that this was followed by an equally extended period of drought. The evidence of the ice exactly mirrors the timetable of social upheaval, refugee exodus, and final disintegration.
THE GREEN DESERT
It is not too much of a stretch to see some incipient parallels to the way in which Peru’s coastal desert has been developed during the past 20 years. On the highway a few miles south of the Moche temples is the small town of Virú, which might properly style itself the asparagus capital of the world. On the outskirts of town a billboard showed an anthropomorphic bundle of asparagus wearing sunglasses and carrying a passport stamped “New York.” Virú is at the heart of the Proyecto Chavimochic, a vast expanse of irrigated green fields that until recently were naked sand. The project is almost entirely dependent on diversions from the Río Santa, which draws nearly half of its volume from the snow peaks of the Cordillera Blanca. Melting ice has transformed Peru into the biggest producer of asparagus in the world. The government kickstarted the enterprise in the late 1980s, investing $900 million in irrigation canals and other basic infrastructure. When the next phase of the project is completed, more than 350,000 acres of former desert will be carpeted in green. Asparagus has driven a formidable economic boom in the northern province of Trujillo. It has already created 40,000 new full-time jobs, and the long-term plan calls for 130,000 more. Trujillo itself has been transformed from a sleepy, dusty colonial pueblo into a city of 800,000 people, the third largest in Peru. While the squalor of its asentamientos rivals anything in Lima, the glitz of its malls equals anything in the United States, the appliance stores laden with 52-inch flat-screen TVs and brushed-aluminum double-door refrigerators. The idea behind Chavimochic was not necessarily to promote big corporate agribusiness, but such is the logic of the market. Rising land prices attract speculators. Profits reflect economies of scale. Small farmers cannot afford processing and export facilities, and so they sell their acreage to the big guys, and the biggest of the big guys is Camposol. Camposol’s chief of irrigation, Javier Calderón Choy, a friendly young man with a neatly trimmed black goatee, gave me a daylong tour of one of the company’s huge plantations. What did I know about asparagus? Not much, except that I liked to eat it, especially with fish, but by the end of the day Calderón and his colleagues had stuffed my brain with more facts about the vegetable than I could absorb. We signed in at one of the entrance checkpoints, washed our hands, disinfected our boots. Extravagantly green fields abutted directly on rolling dunes hundreds of feet tall. One large field was planted with waist-high bushes with feathery, gray-green leaves; a scrawny desert WINTER 2011
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fox darted in and out of the rows, relishing the red berries. The next was scored with narrow trenches of bare sand, where pickers were hard at work with blue plastic harvesting buckets. Both fields were asparagus. I was confused. Calderón explained that the bushes are allowed to grow to full size before being cut back to the root, which then produces an edible stalk. I asked if Camposol grew both species of asparagus, green and white. He gave me a patient look. “They’re not separate species,” he said. “It just depends how you cultivate them.” For some reason Europeans like white, while Americans prefer green. If you want white, you cover the stalks with sand; if you want the other kind, you expose the stalks to the air and they turn green through photosynthesis. Clearly Calderón’s job was to impress me with the modest environmental footprint of the operation, but even if it was PR it was convincing. All the water came from drip irrigation, calibrated by custom-designed software to give the plants the bare minimum they needed to thrive. At the end of many of the rows of bushes were sticky trays of molasses, placed there to attract bugs away from the crop. Plastic screens drenched in vegetable oil served the same purpose. Corridors between the fields were sown with plants that would appeal to beneficial insects. At the crest of a hill, we walked down a kind of alleyway formed by colorful stacked boxes of habanero peppers. The fumes felt like tear gas. Nearby, workers in face masks were using long wooden paddles to stir bubbling cauldrons of a thick, yellowish-green liquid—a biological pesticide—like a scene out of Macbeth. Later, on the processing floor, where the asparagus is graded, washed, trimmed, bundled, and boxed, it was the same story, from the pedal-operated sprays that kept our plastic boots clean to the recycled boxes being stacked onto trucks at the loading dock. It was all very impressive. But, I asked Calderón, with the population growing, the climate changing, and the glacier-fed Río Santa shrinking, how could it all be sustained? He nodded gravely. “Yes,” he agreed, “that is the big question.”
HIGH SIERRA Leaving behind this surreal landscape of
green fields, sand dunes, and ancient ruins, I traveled for several hours up the valley of the Santa, on a bone-rattling road that was more rock than dirt, to spend a week among the glaciers of the Cordillera Blanca. At about 5,000 feet the road entered the narrow, sheer-sided Cañon del Pato, cutting its way through the rock face in a series of rough-hewn tunnels. Wedged between the canyon walls was one of Peru’s biggest hydropower plants, operated by the giant North Carolina–based utility Duke Energy, another enterprise, like Chavimochic, that is thirsty for these waters. A few miles from the dam was Duke’s company town, Huallanca. Coming after a string of scrubby, dirt-poor settlements it was an incongruous sight, a tidy collection of paved streets, red-roofed houses with satellite dishes, shady palms, an aquamarine swimming pool. Once the road left the canyon, it broadened out into the high valley of the Santa, which people call the Callejón de Huaylas. To the west was the Cordillera Negra, a parched range of dark rock. To the east lay the Cordillera Blanca, a 120-mile crenellated wall of more than 700 glaciers. There is a gravity about this valley, for it has seen a series of terrible natural disasters. The Campo Santo (Sacred Field) of Yungay marks the greatest of these. On May 31, 1970, one of the strongest earthquakes ever recorded shook loose a portion of Glacier 511, on
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A LIFE OF HARD LABOR Ten thousand feet up in the Cordillera Blanca, peasant farmers scratch out a living from fields of wheat.
the northwest-facing slopes of Huascarán. An incalculable volume of ice, rock, mud, and debris swept down the valley, moving with such momentum that it literally went airborne. Standing tree trunks were found later in the path of the avalanche, stripped of their bark and leaves by the pocket of compressed air beneath the flying monster. It obliterated the town of Yungay, killing 15,000 people. Beyond the Campo Santo, a solemn place of rosebushes, quiet paths, and white crosses, the scar of the glacial collapse is visible as a darker streak on the mountain, like the shadow of decay on a dental X-ray. I spent the next few days exploring the rough back roads and trails that led up into the mountains. Some of the peaks formed perfect pyramids; others were topped with dizzying spires of fluted ice; others, like the double-humped Huascarán, were pure mass and bulk. They utterly eclipsed the human scale. On the steep approaches, there were fields of corn and wheat and tumbles of pre-Inca ruins. Bunches of stubby, large-grained Andean corn were hung to dry from the eaves of adobe houses. The clear air was fragrant with eucalyptus. Wildflowers of every shape, size, and color grew in the untamed canyons beneath the glaciers, from two-foot-tall, pale purple tayas, giant members of the lupine family, to dark red alpine blossoms no bigger than the head of a thumbtack. I met Lonnie’s friend César Portocarrero in Huaraz, a bustling city of 115,000 people that serves as the mountaineering and trekking hub for the cordillera. It was the 40th anniversary of the Huascarán disaster, and church bells were tolling to assemble people for earthquake drills. César heads a staff of 15 at the Glaciology and Water Resources Unit (UGRH) of Peru’s National Water Authority, where I found his office tucked away in a corner of the courtyard behind a glassed-in shrine to the Virgin Mary. A man of about Lonnie’s age, with thick, glossy black hair, he was dressed in khakis and a tattersall plaid shirt. His manner was warm, and he had a droll sense of humor. Trained as a civil engineer, César first studied glaciology in Alaska, where, he said, his fondest memory was of hiking in the wilderness, bellowing “Kumbaya” at the top of his lungs to keep the grizzlies at bay. Later there was a year at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, where he worked on climate prediction. “It was 1995, and people were asking, what do we know about climate change?” he said. “I told them, in Peru we’re already seeing it.” We talked about his work with Lonnie on Quelccaya, and he opened the top buttons of his shirt to show me a souvenir of his 2003 expedition to that Rosetta Stone of glaciers: a long, ragged scar that illustrated the hazards of his trade. An explosive charge had gone awry and sent shards of bedrock into his chest. “I guess I’m lucky to be alive,” he laughed. Lonnie’s own adventures were a source of some concern to César. There was the time in 1993 when his American friend had insisted on drilling for weeks on Huascarán when the neo-Maoist terrorist group Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) was still active in the sierra. (Not a problem, Lonnie had told me: “The great thing about being up above 20,000 feet is that no one bothers you.”) There was Lonnie’s terrible asthma, of course, but there had also been an alarming episode of edema last year on Hualcán, a 20,085-foot peak adjacent to Huascarán.
“My feet swelled up very badly,” Lonnie told me later. “I had to get down to Huaraz, but the unfortunate thing was that the only way to get there was on foot, and that included some pretty technical climbing. By the time I reached Huaraz, my feet and lower legs were three times their normal size.” It was César, however, who delivered the punch line. Lonnie had ended up in intensive care in Lima for 10 days. At one point a cardiologist asked him if he had ever had this problem before. Lonnie said yes, about 20 years earlier. And what did the doctor say? the cardiologist asked. Lonnie replied, Well, he told me to avoid high altitudes.
DEAD ICE César returned to glaciology only recently to head
the UGRH. For the previous 14 years he had worked with indigenous communities to develop new forms of sustainable agriculture, teaching skills like drip irrigation, soil analysis, seed selection, and the biological control of pests—which are also scaling the mountains as the temperature rises. But to say he returned to glaciology was not quite accurate, he said; it was all connected. Dozens of crops are at risk from climate change and melting glaciers. Corn, for example, used to grow best between about 8,000 and 9,000 feet; now its range was moving upward. “People get excited because they can cultivate at higher altitudes,” he said, “but you have to explain that the advantages are only temporary. You keep going higher and higher until eventually you run out of soil.” César’s glaciology unit has many responsibilities, including the continuous collection of data on temperature, precipitation, relative humidity, mass balance, and the sustainable use of water. There is a constant political subtext to this work, he told me. Who sets the agenda? The ministry of agriculture? Mining and energy? Natural resources? The hydropower corporation? The state water authority? Each in turn had exercised jurisdiction and each had imposed its own priorities, defining what a glacier was and what it was there for. Risk management has been central to the unit’s work, César said, since it was founded in response to a catastrophic 1941 landslide that destroyed much of Huaraz and killed 4,000 people. The glaciologist’s worst nightmare is a glacial lake outburst flood, commonly if inelegantly known as a GLOF. Such floods, and other dark powers of the glaciers, are the stuff of indigenous legends, which speak of angry lake gods and waters turning blood red. As an engineer, César specializes in the prevention of GLOFs by the construction of dams and drainage tunnels. There had been a neardisaster just weeks before my visit, he said. Thirty-five million cubic feet of ice from Hualcán, on the other side of the glacier from Lonnie’s drilling site, had fallen into Laguna 513, a lake high above Carhuaz, a town of 14,000. A 90-foot mini-tsunami had overtopped the moraine, but fortunately César’s team had built a 75-foot protective dam in the 1990s, which barely averted a tragedy. I said I’d like to visit another lake that presented similar risks, and he suggested the Laguna Llaca. I went there the next day. César himself was tied up with other commitments, but he assigned one of his senior glaciologists, Jesús Gómez López, to be my guide. At a shade under 15,000 feet we paused
The earthquake shook loose a portion of Glacier 511, and an incalculable volume of ice, rock, mud, and debris swept down the valley with such momentum that it literally went airborne
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THE THIRSTY SLUMS Once a week, water trucks make their rounds of the Lima shantytown of Virgen de Chapi, one of scores that lack running water.
for breath at an abandoned compound that had been erected for the workers who had built the dam. From there we clambered up a narrow, rocky trail to the foot of the glacier. Llaca had all the main risk factors for collapse, Gómez told me, with a large hanging ice mass on a steep, west-facing slope above the lake. Recession had split the tongue of the glacier in two. The dark bedrock between the two halves would absorb more of the sun’s heat and so create more meltwater, and that in turn would cause slippage between the rock and the detached lower portion of the glacier—the “dead ice.” Gravity would do the rest. It was like an earthquake, he said: you knew that all the conditions were there; you just didn’t know exactly when it would happen. It was a chilly place of melancholy beauty. Above the main laguna was a secondary lake of recent formation. Mountain swallows banked and swooped, picking off insects that somehow had taken up residence on the small ice floes. The left side of the wall of dead ice was a dirty blackish-brown from dust and grit blown off the mountainside. The remainder was a slab of unearthly ice-blue, riddled with diagonal cracks and striations. I stood there and listened to the glacier. There was a soft creaking sound, as of ship’s timbers, punctuated by a whiplike crack, and then a splash. It was hard to escape the idea that it was the sound of something dying.
THE DISPUTED LAKE
I spent my last full day in the Cordillera Blanca at the largest of all the glacial lakes, the Laguna Parón. This time César came too. Parón not only represents the pin-
nacle of his career as an engineer; it also stands on the fault line of climate change and water politics. What has happened there in the past two years may not be the stuff of international headlines—at least not yet. But it is an early harbinger of what lies ahead. The lake is almost two miles long. In the sunlight its color ranges from jade green to the turquoise of Navajo jewelry. The snow peaks that feed it are razor-edged white pyramids. One of them, the 19,767-foot Artesonraju, is said to have been the model for the Paramount Pictures logo. Parón has always been the most worrisome of the lakes, César said. Unlike the moraine at Laguna 513, which is solid bedrock, Parón’s is a porous and unstable mass of rock, ice, and mud. The challenge of securing it was unprecedented in the history of glacial engineering. When work began in the early 1980s there was nothing more than a mule track to the lake, no communications equipment, no medical supplies, no decompression chamber for the scuba divers who had to descend almost 200 feet in ice-cold water and pitch darkness to find an area of rock strong enough to support the drilling of a drainage tunnel. The work took a full decade and was eventually completed in 1992. But years of near-disaster, when surging wet-season lake levels came close to breaching the moraine, had given birth to another idea: here was an immense force that could be tamed for large-scale irrigation projects in the lower valley of the Río Santa and for electricity. The problem was the dramatic variability of the river’s seasonal flows, and that was where Parón was so useful. Releases of the lake’s vast reserves of water could be regulated on demand. But who had first call on that water, and for what purpose? The local communities that needed it for their crops or the successive owners of the 265-megawatt Cañon del Pato hydroelectric plant, which I had passed as I entered the valley? Among U. S. utilities, Duke Energy, which took over ownership of the WINTER 2011
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plant in 1999, has been a leading player in the development of renewable energy and the fight for climate legislation. But renewables bring their own complications. Peru was an attractive place for companies like Duke in the late 1990s, when the government privatized large swaths of the economy and offered attractive tax breaks for foreign investors. But tensions increased after Duke’s arrival. When the plant had all the water it needed and the flow from Parón was shut down, subsistence farmers in the valley below complained that they lacked water for irrigation. During heavy releases their fields were inundated with glacial silt. The communities chose Antonio Dueñas Goñi, a local catechist, as their leader, and he joined us for the visit to Parón. The valley population of 5,000 is scattered in a number of separate hamlets, he told me in halting Spanish as the afternoon sun began to move behind the mountains, casting the lake into deep shadow. His own village is called Paltay—roughly translatable as “dear little avocado.” People grow corn, potatoes, wheat, peas, and flowers, which they sell in the market in Caraz. Most are native Quechua speakers; half are illiterate. The argument came to a head in the dry season of 2008, Dueñas said, when the water level fell drastically, creating an ugly bathtub ring around the lake. Duke’s drawdowns were not the only issue. Many of the participants in the drama also noted an underlying problem: Parón lay entirely within the boundaries of the Huascarán National Park. How then could the rights to operate a dam there have been conceded to foreigners? That July, the peasants held a prayer service on the moraine. They emphasized that the water was a gift from God, that their relationship with the glaciers was of a spiritual nature. “We call the mountain Papa Yaya,” Dueñas said, the Spanish and Quechua words for “father.” Prayers over, the peasants erected a roadblock and closed the discharge valves, releasing just enough water for their own needs and beginning a standoff that would last for 18 months. The occupation might have led to disaster. Whether the peasants were engaging in an act of brinkmanship or simply unaware of the risks they were creating is a matter of debate. A lake level of 4,200 meters (13,780 feet) at Parón is the equivalent of a four-alarm fire. With the valves shut down and an unusually severe rainy season, the waters crept steadily upward until they came within 13 feet of overtopping the dam, at which point Duke urged the government to intervene. The authorities declared a 60-day state of emergency and then formed a commission to figure out how the lake should be managed in the future. “The matter is still unresolved,” said Mark Hoffman, the president of Duke’s operations in Peru, when I called him at his office in Lima several weeks after my visit to Parón. “Initially the government didn’t invite Duke to join the committee, but we’ve insisted that we have to be included. At the same time, we recognize that we’re just one of the players, and we’ll abide by whatever the committee eventually decides. “Parón has been a real eye-opener for us,” he went on. “An operation like this is hugely complex, and it requires the participation not just of Duke but of other users like the small-scale farmers. Since the emergency, I think we’ve become a lot more sensitive to the needs of the local communities.”
THE REAL PRICE OF WATER
Adapting to climate change is a singularly complex challenge. It requires money, new technology and infrastructure, institutional capacity, accurate data, different ways of producing and consuming energy, changes in culture and lifestyle, and the nimbleness to adjust to constantly shifting and uncertain circumstances. Peru is an object lesson in why the countries that are most at risk are the ones least equipped to respond. In a sense, changing public policy is the easiest part of the equation, said María Paz Cigarán, who heads an environmental think tank in Lima called Libelula (Dragonfly). “We have never put a real price on water,” she told me. “We often have rationing during the dry season, but we need conservation, rational storage systems, recycling of wastewater, efficient distribution, and a change in tariffs to benefit the poor.” The government is not close to getting a handle on the problem, she said, and no government official I spoke to took issue with that criticism. Planning is haphazard, responsibilities are scattered among a slew of agencies, and a newly created Ministry of the Environment is just finding its feet. Basic data and research on the future impact of climate change on Peru are rudimentary. The country does not even have a coherent national meteorological system, and building one would cost close to $100 million. Respond to climate change with expensive infrastructure: that was the constant refrain from almost everyone I talked to. The ultimate fantasy for rescuing Lima is to desalinate the ocean, but no one dares to attach a dollar amount to that. Even stopping short of fantasy, the price tags are huge. Duke will invest heavily in natural gas pipelines; the Chavimochic irrigation project will deal with the declining flow of the Río Santa by constructing a huge new storage reservoir costing hundreds of millions of dollars . The government’s most far-reaching response to Lima’s water crisis is to reengineer the Andes. Already it has converted some 20 small glacial lakes on the headwaters of the Río Rímac, the lifeblood of the city, into reservoirs, linked by a network of canals to a much larger natural storage lake called Marcapomacocha. The so-called Marca II phase is even more ambitious. It would involve drilling a tunnel through the mountains to tap the Río Mantaro, an important river on the far side of the Continental Divide, but the government has deferred the project for 15 years now, alarmed at the likely cost of, in effect, replacing real glaciers with artificial ones. Even assuming that projects like these are necessary and desirable, where would the money come from? The finance plan outlined at last year’s U.N. climate conference in Copenhagen seems one obvious place to start. Wealthier nations pledged $10 billion a year from 2010 to 2012, growing to $100 billion in 2020, to help the most vulnerable countries adapt to climate change. But there are all sorts of caveats, said Heather Allen, an international advocate with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “For example, it’s really tricky to know whether this money is in fact what they call ‘new and additional funding’ or just a redesignation of other kinds of development aid,” she said. Ironically, she added, despite the gravity of Peru’s predicament, its per capita gross domestic product of around $4,000 does
When the flow was shut down, subsistence farmers in the valley below complained that they had no water for irrigation. During heavy releases, their fields were inundated with glacial silt.
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THE GREAT RECESSION The glaciers on Ocshapalca (19,317 feet) and Ranrapalca (20,216 feet) are melting into the Laguna Llaca.
not fit the rubric of “most vulnerable.” That term is limited mainly to drought- and flood-prone African nations and small island states that face the prospect of being submerged by the ocean.
THE FOG CATCHERS Adapting to climate change in
the developing world means thinking very big but at the same time thinking very small. It demands an openness to what is new and unimagined, but also a respect for what is old and forgotten. In describing his work with peasant farmers, César Portocarrero had stressed the importance of ancient forms of water use, which derived from a sense of its scarcity—and of its sacredness. To a surprising degree I found that idea echoed at senior levels of the Peruvian government. “For indigenous people,” said Eduardo Durand, director of climate change at the Ministry of the Environment, “water comes from the gods of the mountains, the apus. If it no longer flows, people say, we must have done something wrong. We don’t understand what the apus are telling us to do.” In fact, through long ancestral practice, they often know exactly what to do. This is not a romantic view; it is eminently pragmatic. Some of the ancient methods that need to be revived were spelled out by the government in its most recent report to the United Nations on climate change: the care of springs, water harvesting, the cultivation of water-conserving plants, pre-Columbian irrigation systems, Inca-style agricultural terracing, and so on. And this kind of small-bore strategy can happen in the cities as well as in the rural areas. For all the tough hiking in the cordillera, stumbling over boulders and wading across freezing, milky blue glacial streams, nothing had quite prepared me for the long, breathless 45-degree climb to the top of a hill that rose 2,000 feet or more above one of Lima’s bonedry shantytowns. I had come here with two local women to see the neighborhood’s celebrated atrapanieblas, the fog catchers. Magally de la Cruz was the older of the two. She was a sturdy, vibrantly good-humored woman with a riotous wardrobe: a blue and purple jacket, tight pink pants, a woolly red hat with silver spangles over a mass of curly brown hair, a gigantic pair of sunglasses with gold plastic trim. In the living room of her cinderblock home she had hung a picture of a farm in the southern province of Arequipa. A herd of cows grazed placidly in a lush meadow, beneath a blue sky with puffy clouds. I asked her if she was originally from Arequipa, and she said, “No, I just dream of seeing somewhere green like that one day.” The younger woman, Elionor del Castillo, had brought along her 4-year-old, Luís Fernando, who skittered around on the top of the hill oblivious to the almost sheer drop on either side. He had been in the hospital for several weeks after eating some contaminated dirt, Elionor said. It was good for him to get out in the fresh air. From a point of rocks, we looked straight down on the rows of shanties. The sun was trying to break through the garúa and the drift of dust. From far below we could hear the barking of countless dogs and the crowing of roosters. Most of the houses were a drab brown, but some were painted blue, ocher, or lime green, and many were daubed with the symbols of political parties or the words Cristo viene. Christ is coming. Here and there, a larger building was clad with gleaming brown tiles and ornamented with wrought-iron window grilles. Who lives there? I asked. Surtidores, Magally said. I struggled with the word. Suppliers? She gave me a look and said, Narcotraficantes. The name of the settlement was Bellavista del Paraíso. Beautiful view of paradise. 4 2 onearth
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Outside many of the buildings were blue plastic water barrels. When the current government took office in 2006, it made a bold promise of Agua para Todos (Water for Everyone). Billboards to that effect still dot the city. What about here? I asked. Magally gave me another look and shook her head. Elionor said, “We only just got electricity in January. You can’t fight for everything at once.” The water truck, owned by a private company, comes once a week, Magally explained, and one of those blue barrels holds 200 liters, about 52 gallons. People have no option but to pay the prices set by the truck operators. “A family of four in the city pays 20 soles a month for running water,” she said—about seven dollars. “Here we pay three times as much. They say it’s drinking water, but it often comes from contaminated wells so you have to filter and boil it first.” The fog catchers, which were installed here two years ago by a German organization called Alimon, were planted in a row at the summit of the hill. They were vertical nylon mesh screens about 15 feet high and 25 feet wide, like volleyball nets for giants, designed to “comb” droplets of moisture from the garúa, which then run down into a zinc channel and from there into cement holding tanks. On a nearby hilltop was a row of fog catchers of experimental design, like some eccentric school science fair. Many looked like oversize cheese graters. The water they produce is not drinkable, but it can be used around the house for cooking, bathing, and washing clothes. The fog catchers are at their most productive between August and October. Right now it was time for their annual maintenance, which had been neglected because of all the work that had to be done to put in the new electricity lines. The mesh was clogged with green filamentous algae, dried to a hard crust. Snails crawled around on it. Most of the zinc channels had been broken or removed. “Kids come up here and trash everything,” Magally said. “They steal the metal to sell.” We peered down into one of the cement tanks. Except for a dead dog, it was empty. The hillside below was planted with small trees, the ground moistened—when water is available—by porous earthenware pots that acted as crude drip-irrigation systems, a practice that was used by the Incas. When the trees grow to about three feet high, they become natural fog catchers in their own right, capturing water in their leaves. They have an economic value to the community, Magally said. Casuarina is prized as a nitrogen-fixer, increasing the fertility of the soil. Other plantings are medicinal and can be sold in the local markets. Tara, for example, is a remedy for asthma. Sauvila is good for the liver and is also a slimming agent (“which you don’t need if you spend a lot of time climbing these hills,” Magally said with a chuckle). Looking down on the beautiful view of paradise, there was an inevitable temptation to succumb to despair. But as Lao Tzu said, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, and a thousand journeys, ten thousand journeys like that of Magally de la Cruz and Elionor del Castillo will be needed if they are to make a dent in the vastness of Peru’s climate crisis. But they are an essential part of the mix, and the spirit, here in the shantytowns of Lima, was willing. At the foot of the hill, sweaty and exhausted, we stopped at a small tienda. In truth it was no more than an open window in a cinderblock house, where the owner had laid out a few bags of plantain chips and sodas for sale. I bought a large bottle of Inca Kola, Peru’s sickly-sweet, Day-Glo yellow answer to Coke and Pepsi. As Elionor raised it to her lips, I noticed the slogan printed on the label. Con creatividad se puede todo. Creativity makes all things possible.
HIS BRILLIANT CAREER E. O. Wilson visits the Darwin exhibition at the American Museum of Natural History.
Š2010 BOB SACHA
The Human Factor ants, habitat, and the threat of mass extinction d Continue
SUMMER 2009
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SMALL WORLD Wilson lectures at Harvard in 1975 about the caste system in ant colonies.
If you could talk
to any scientist in the world, who would it be? For me, the choice is pretty easy: E. O. Wilson. Wilson is one of the natural world’s keenest observers and, at the same time, probably its most eloquent spokesman. As much as any one person can, he has tried to save what’s left of the astonishing diversity of life. Now 81, Wilson began his career as a naturalist when he was barely out of elementary school. As a 13-year-old Boy Scout, in 1942, he noticed some peculiar ant colonies in a vacant lot near his house, in Mobile, Alabama. In this way, he discovered that the imported red fire ant, a native of South America, had invaded the United States. (The Department of Agriculture’s attempt to eradicate the ants in the 1950s would become a case study in misguided pesticide application, chronicled by Rachel Carson and dubbed by Wilson the “Vietnam of entomology.”) Twenty-five years after his first boyhood discoveries, as a zoology professor at Harvard, Wilson cowrote one of the seminal books in ecology, The Theory of Island Biogeography, and in 1975, more or less singlehandedly, he created a whole new field of inquiry: sociobiology—the concept that behavior, including human behavior, has a basis in evolution. Wilson also became one of the first scientists to warn about what has since become known as the biodiversity crisis. “The worst thing that can happen, will happen,” he wrote in 1980.
[N]ot energy depletion, economic collapse, limited nuclear war, or conquest by a totalitarian government. As terrible as these catastrophes would be for us, they can be repaired within a few generations. The one process ongoing in the 1980s that will take millions of years to correct is the loss of genetic and species diversity by the destruction of natural habitats. This is the folly our descendants are least likely to forgive us. 4 4 onearth
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In 1991, Wilson and his coauthor, Bert Hölldobler, won a Pulitzer Prize—Wilson’s second—for their book The Ants. Though he is now retired from teaching, he is still writing; he published his first novel, Anthill, to generally positive reviews in 2010. He is also still studying ants and still speaking out about the threat that one species—ours— poses to the millions of others on the planet. I met up with Wilson in his office, which is above Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology and right across the hall from the university’s ant collection. In the 1970s, Wilson’s concept of sociobiology caused so much controversy at Harvard that he briefly considered decamping to another university; however, he has said, he could not bear to leave behind the school’s ant collection, which contains nearly 1,000,000 individual ants, representing more than 6,000 species. After we had talked for a while, Wilson showed me around the collection. Many of the ants Wilson gathered himself on trips to, among other places, Brazil, Cuba, Fiji, and New Guinea. Each ant—some were so small I could barely make them out—was marked with a tiny label bearing its name in almost microscopic print. Wilson’s office is decorated with pieces of ant-related art, which friends and colleagues have given him, and also with three hominid skulls, which, he likes to tell visitors, belonged to former grad students. In his 1994 autobiography, Naturalist, Wilson described himself as “a happy man in a terrible century.” By his own account, he places “great store in civility and good manners.” Both in person and in his writing, he is courtly and good-humored. But he’s blunt about the damage that humans are causing. “It seems like almost on an annual basis now we have another really massive biodiversity problem to worry about,” he told me. “We’ve reached the point where global catastrophes are getting to be the norm. We were just hacking down parts of the natural world in pieces here and there, but now things are getting global and they are coming right home.” I spoke to Wilson about his early
scientific career, his turn to environmental advocacy, and the future of biodiversity. One of the first topics we spoke about was Wilson’s fieldwork in the 1950s and 1960s. E. O. WILSON: When you went out into the field, say in Veracruz, Mexico, or Fiji, when I first got there, you didn’t have somebody take you in a four-wheel drive to a field station that was all set up and give you a cot. I would get into a town somewhere and make myself comfortable and I almost always collected alone. I prefer that actually. Then someone would tell me there’s a nice patch of rainforest if you go 30 kilometers up the road. And I would get a ride out there. The next thing you’d do is get out of the car, pry apart a barbed wire fence, and step through. You’d walk among the cows, watching out not to get your feet gummy with cow manure. Then there it is: good-looking vegetation, and it’s on an incline. So you know probably the reason it hasn’t been cut was because it’s on a slope. Before you get there the land dips down into a stream and a bog. You have to get through another barbed wire fence and cross the stream, getting yourself muddy, and then finally you are climbing your way up and starting to collect. That was so typical of those days. So many islands were like this. There were not many active field biologists in those days, but most of us became aware, especially those of us who were going into tropical areas, that entire ecosystems were being wiped out. IN 1967 WILSON AND ROBERT MACARTHUR, A BIOLOGY PROFESSOR at Princeton, published The Theory of Island Biogeography, their landmark work in ecology. The book attempted to explain why certain islands are species-rich, while others are species-poor. One of the key variables is size: all other things being equal, larger islands will be home to more species than smaller ones. The ratio, Wilson and MacArthur found, tends to follow a consistent mathematical formula: roughly speaking, the number of species doubles with every tenfold increase in area. The formula also works in reverse, so that if an island’s area is reduced by 90 percent, the number of species that can survive will drop by half. I asked Wilson about the development of the theory and how it applied to “islands” of habitat in a fragmented landscape.
N R D C A CONTINENT OF RICHES
AMANDA MAXWELL Advocate in the international program, focusing on wildlife protection and clean energy development in Latin America
E. O. Wilson talks about biodiversity in many parts of the world. How would you describe biodiversity in Latin America?
Latin America is home to some of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet. Costa Rica immediately comes to mind. Its rainforests, mountains, and coasts simply pulse with life. Just a few minutes in a Costa Rican rainforest is enough to notice the complex networks among the variety of species there. At the southern end of the continent, in Chile’s Patagonia, there are remarkable terrestrial and riparian ecosystems along the Baker River. This nutrientrich river, which originates in Andean glaciers, ultimately feeds the biodiverse marine fjord system near the Pacific coast. The Baker is another tangible illustration of the connections in nature—in this case among the area’s glaciers, temperate rainforests, swamps, and marine life. What is the major threat to biodiversity in Latin America?
The human need for more and different types of energy sources. The Amazon and other native forests are being clear-cut for petroleum exploration and biofuels production. Coal-fired power plants and oil and natural gas drilling are laying waste to the Pacific and Atlantic coastlines. Poorly planned hydroelectric plants are flooding large areas and changing the hydrology of sensitive river systems. What can be done about these threats?
LEFT, TIME & LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES; ILLUSTRATION BY BRUCE MORSER
WILSON: Islands are the laboratories of species formation and ex-
tinction. Islands are separate experiments in what species can get there and what species turn into new species, which then go extinct, and so on. That’s why islands have always been so important. They were important to Darwin and much more important to Alfred Russel Wallace, who founded biogeography. In 1959 I got together with Robert MacArthur. We were two young, ambitious biologists. I was much more the naturalist and data person and Robert was a brilliant mathematical modeler. The idea was to use islands as our laboratory to understand how species spread and how and why they become extinct. On islands the patterns became much clearer than on the mainland. It also turns out that islands have the highest rates of human-induced extinctions. They are the real disaster areas. Hawaii is the extinction capital of America and one of the hot spots of the world. Then we realized that the same principles apply to anything that is broken into fragments—for example, bodies of freshwater, from rivers to streams to springs to lakes to ponds. Continued on p. 46
As Wilson says, we need new agricultural methods and strong renewable energy sectors. These would lessen the pressure to explore and exploit the fossil fuel reserves in Latin America’s threatened ecosystems. New energy efficiency standards would decrease national energy consumption, so that existing generation is used more wisely. How is working in Latin America different from NRDC’s domestic work on these issues?
Each country is very distinct, so you have to work closely with local partners to understand and support the priorities specific to that place. As an international organization, we have to choose our projects strategically to ensure that we bring an added value to local campaigns. For example, Costa Rica’s goal to be carbon neutral by 2020 makes it a real leader in the region. We bring NRDC’s technical expertise to our partnership with the government in the search for clean energy.
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IN THE 1970S WILSON’S INTEREST IN EXTINCTION CEASED TO BE
academic. He began to speak out and to rethink his assumptions about what it means to be a scientist. I asked him about this transition. WILSON: In the 1960s it was sort of just in my peripheral vision that what we were doing was relevant to understanding the extinction process. I thought that what we should be doing was finding out the information needed. At that time, oddly, in the scientific culture it was regarded as unseemly that scientists speak up or take an activist role. And being at Harvard, with all the devotion I felt to the purity of science, I certainly could see the problem, but my duty was to stay with science and just get the theory and facts right. And that I shouldn’t say anything. After all, there was the World Wildlife Fund and the International Union for the Conservation of Nature, all those great people, and they were taking care of that. By 1970 there was a significant burgeoning of conservation awareness and the early stages of the new conservation movement, which was also becoming increasingly scientific in its basis. I give credit to Paul Ehrlich [now president of Stanford University’s Center for Conservation Biology] and to Peter Raven [now president emeritus of the Missouri Botanical Garden], who were firstrate scientists. They were yelling their heads off by that time, and nobody was calling them exhibitionists or loudmouths. So I thought probably they were an example to be followed. In 1974 I published a hard-hitting article in Harvard Magazine on species extinction and the desperate need to have a global conservation movement. That’s how I got into it.
not the most abundant insects. That didn’t occur until the beginning of the age of mammals. We know that by 15 million years ago ants had taken over. Their habitats had tens of millions of years to evolve and accommodate the ants as they became more and more prevalent. There are vast numbers of insects that make their living off of ants, and the ants make their living off of other insects, particularly sap-sucking insects, with which they share nutrients. Many, many species of plants have special structures that they developed so that ants could live in them, and the ants in turn could offer them protection. After this long period of evolution, ants eased into their preeminent position, which they have held for 15 million years. Not bad. Now considering humanity, good lord... When Homo erectus began to evolve a million years ago, they too were quite scarce. Then kaboom. Homo sapiens became prominent, maybe 200,000 years ago. Out of Africa they spread, maybe 60,000 years ago. And they began to have an impact. They wiped out the megafauna wherever they went, animals of maybe 100 pounds or more. Then kaboom, kaboom, kaboom. Neolithic agriculture. Villages and towns and technology. We hit the world’s fauna and flora with a sucker punch, if I could use ordinary language like that. They just weren’t ready for us. We really got on the scene big time 10,000 years ago. No way to coadapt. The ants gave them at least 30 million years, and we gave them 10,000 years. We’re too darn good at it.
effort into mapping the
WILSON OFTEN COMPARES HUMANS WITH ANTS AND TERMITES.
Social insects, like humans, cooperate in ways that are enormously empowering. I asked him why it is that ants don’t, at least as far we know, drive other species to extinction. WILSON: Ants and termites today make up very roughly threequarters of the total insect biomass. A lot of people might think that’s amazing because there are only some 15,000 ant species, whereas there are over 900,000 known species of insects. In terms of biomass, they own the world. But in terms of the damage they’ve done? Have the ants taken over the world? No. Why? Because—and this tells us the significance of the human story—ants came into existence in the Mesozoic, more than 100 million years ago. We have fossils now and we know what they looked like and how they appeared. In the beginning they were rather scarce. It was only after tens of millions of years of evolution, occasionally rushing out and stinging the feet of dinosaurs who were clumsy enough to step on their nests, that they diversified a good deal and probably had advanced societies. But they still were 4 6 onearth
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SO WHAT ABOUT US? I ASKED WILSON WHY IT WAS THAT HUMANS
seem to be so good at driving other organisms extinct. Are we just very good competitors, or are we somehow qualitatively different from other organisms? WILSON: This is a very rough figure, but before modern humans came along, especially before the Neolithic period 10,000 years ago, the extinction rate was, as close as we can tell, about one species going extinct per million per year. And the rate at which species were being created before humanity plunked down in the middle of things was the same. So you had very roughly an equilibrium. Even though species were coming and going, it was a very slow turnover. We have now upped the extinction rate by at least 1,000 times. It could easily go to 10,000. We have eliminated so much natural habitat that we now have places all around the world where we’ve cut everything down to 10 percent or 20 percent of the original cover. That’s what you see in the Philippines, in Madagascar, in Hawaii. Substantial parts of Indonesia are going that way fast. Another very rough figure: if you reduce an area by 90 percent, so you have only 10 percent of the original forest left, for example, whatever the habitat is, you can expect to sustain only about half the species. Half of them, roughly,
will go extinct. This is what we learned from our theory of island biogeography, and it happens pretty quick. We are also reducing the birthrate—the cradles are disappearing. Now, why would I say that if we’re not very careful we could easily take it from 1,000 up to 10,000 times the pre-human extinction rate? Because it’s so easy to knock out the land that remains. That’s why I think we can use those high figures. Some experts might be more conservative, but that’s where we’re at now. That’s why we have to create preserves all around the world, make them as large as possible, and also connect them up with one another. Most scientists working in conservation and biology would agree. We need corridors, particularly in the face of climate change. In other words, humans are unique as destroyers. There’s never been anything like humans before on a global scale. WILSON HAS SAID THAT “THE PATTERN OF HUMAN POPULATION
growth in the twentieth century was more bacterial than primate.” I asked him how this pattern has been sustained.
FRANS LANTING/CORBIS
WILSON: We need to realize that up until this point we have saved
our own species with technology, new developments in agriculture, opening new land—and therefore of course destroying large numbers of other species. We’ve always found a way around our exponential population growth through technology. When it comes to energy extraction, we’ve had to develop very high technology and complex systems, and they’re getting more complex all the time. We’ve reached a point where what we have wrought is so complicated and ill planned that we can’t handle a lot of it. That takes us to a point where we have to recognize that we’re not going to have any kind of livable planet for ourselves unless we make our environment sustainable—and that includes the living environment. We have to slam on the brakes before we wreck the planet. Which we’re about to do. I’m exasperated by the professional optimists, who say, “These bad things are happening, but human genius and the resources this good earth has given us will allow us to keep on doing pretty much what we’ve been doing. So don’t worry about it.” There is a huge flaw in that reasoning. You may be familiar with the famous French riddle of the 29th day of lily pads, which everybody should know. Most of the things that should be worrying us are happening exponentially. With each interval that passes, the impact is more serious. There comes a time when the next interval is devastating, and here comes the riddle of the 29th day. There is a pond with one lily pad. The number of lily pads doubles every day. The pond will fill up by the 30th day. On what day is the pond half full? The 29th day. That’s the whole point. Okay, let’s take the optimists’ argument. Let’s assume that the lily pads are getting really worried. They point out, Hey guys, we’ve got one short period left and then we’re all going to be fighting over the same nutrients and choking each other out. Not to worry: some of the lily pads are technological geniuses. They’ll figure out a way to get around this. They announce to every lily pad’s joy that they have found an opening now to another empty pond of the same size, so you don’t have to change your patterns and way of life, fellow lily pads, we can go on. Okay. When does that new pond fill up? On the 31st day. That’s the problem with humanity today, and I don’t care if we spend a huge amount of money to shoot people off into space toward Mars. I don’t care if we figure out a way to do fusion or find some other energy source. We can’t go on like this.
IN HIS BOOK THE DIVERSITY OF LIFE, WILSON WRITES ABOUT THE
five “mass extinction” events that have been identified in the geologic record. The most recent of these took place 65 million years ago, when an asteroid seven and a half miles wide hit the Earth, killing off not just the dinosaurs, but also the pterosaurs, plesiosaurs, and mosasaurs. I asked Wilson if he thought we were in the midst of another mass extinction event. WILSON: Sure we are. We’re in the early stages but it’s coming on
fast. Compared with a giant meteorite strike, of course, it’s taking longer, but that only means a few centuries, and we’re coming up to where it will get up to those catastrophic levels within this century. Unless we can somehow stop it. Population is going to peak at around 9 billion or 10 billion, 40 percent more than we have now. We can manage this if we make the necessary changes. We can’t just go on using the usual nonrenewable energy and planting the same old crops. We have to develop dryland agriculture in areas that have run out of groundwater. That agriculture has to be based on—I will just say it right out—genetically modified crops that can produce high yields without sucking up the world’s remaining groundwater. At the same time, we’ve got to save what’s left—biological diversity. That’s basically it. We can do it with reserves, with a lot more knowledge of what the species are and what they need. This is the reason, incidentally, why I put a lot of my time in the last 10 years into helping to get the Encyclopedia of Life started. [See Alan Burdick, “The (New) Web of Life,” OnEarth, Fall 2009.] We need to be putting a lot more scientific and technical effort into mapping the world’s biodiversity. We only know fewer than 10 percent of species. We’re really flying blind. WILSON HAS WRITTEN THAT WE ARE A PRODUCT OF OUR OWN
evolutionary history, that we evolved to be shortsighted, kinconcerned creatures, and that this is no longer serving us very well. But how do you get beyond your own evolutionary history? WILSON: We are ill equipped by instinct to control ourselves. Even with
our tremendous intellect, we have a deep propensity for group conflict. Look at our defense expenditures, the way we glorify the constant expansion of human settlement and human growth, our archaic religions, which give us nothing but grief because they are essentially tribal. Our religions are ill equipped to handle our present problems, especially when they start trying to discredit what we can find out and prove with science. However, we are adaptable. I think that when we get enough really serious knocks, we can start treating our problems as problems and not as the evil machinations of conspiracies—which is the way we tend to think about them. Our problems come from the fact that we are a Star Wars civilization. When you think about Star Wars, those movies reflect what we are: people blowing up whole planets. We have Paleolithic emotions, Stone Age emotions—we’ve inherited those nice and pure. We have medieval institutions. And we have godlike technology. Put those three together and you have a very dangerous mix. So, somehow I think we ought to develop a new kind of self-understanding, self-reflection, and self-imaging. Then we might be able to actually get somewhere together. Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer at the New Yorker and author of Field Notes From a Catastrophe (Bloomsbury). She is writing a book about extinction. WINTER 2011
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BY DANIEL GRUSHKIN
H
ILLUSTRATION BY GARY HOVLAND
More than half a century ago, President Dwight D. Eisenhower inaugurated a program to construct the nation’s Interstate highway system. The program changed the way Americans live. Today, facing oil shortages and a climate crisis (tailpipe emissions make up 29 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions), our transportation needs have changed. Here are some ways in which the desperately needed transportation system of the future can be made more efficient, safer, and cleaner.
BUS RAPID TRANSIT
The government builds dedicated lanes for buses, on the same principle as train lines, that allow them to avoid traffic. Buses consume less than a quarter of the energy per passenger mile that cars and trucks use (and the more seats are filled, the better they compare).
HIGH EFFICIENCY OIL SECURIT Y FEE
The nation adopts an oil security fee to align the price of gasoline with the cost of our dependence on foreign oil. If Congress sets the fee at 10 cents per gallon for gasoline and 15 cents for diesel, this could provide the depleted Highway Trust Fund with a desperately needed $20 billion a year.
VEHICLES
The government institutes incentives such as tax breaks or rebates for drivers who purchase high-efficiency vehicles, and gives priority to electric cars in high-occupancy vehicle lanes. Compared with standard cars, electric vehicles can reduce greenhouse gas emissions by as much as 54 percent. NRDC experts blog about transportation issues at http://switchboard.nrdc.org/ transportation.php
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VEHICLE MILEAGE INCENTIVES From 1980 to 2006 the total vehicle miles traveled (VMT) doubled, while total highway lane miles grew by only 4.4 percent. Traffic costs drivers $78 billion a year in wasted fuel and lost work time. As gasoline use declines with more efficient vehicles, the federal government assesses a fee, based on VMT, of about 2 cents per mile.
CONGESTION PRICING
To reduce traffic on major thoroughfares and in urban centers, cities charge peak and off-peak prices for driving. This system has already been implemented in several places, including the New Jersey Turnpike. Meanwhile, Pay As You Drive Insurance would tie premiums directly to the amount policyholders drive, giving them clear incentives to reduce vehicle use.
TRAFFIc MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS
A series of small steps to optimize traffic flow collectively save on fuel and emissions. Synchronized traffic lights cut down on stop-and-start driving. Ramp meters that stop cars briefly at on-ramps prevent bottlenecks. Programmable signs allow traffic managers to estimate traffic patterns and direct vehicles to alternate routes.
HIGH SPEED RAIL
In 2009 the Obama administration launched a new national highspeed rail program. Producing only 0.26 pounds of CO2 per passenger mile, this could cut greenhouse gas emissions by 4 million tons a year by 2030.
ALTERNATIVE TRANSPORTATION
Cities make major investments in bike lanes, light rail, and walking routes, reducing emissions by as much as 5 percent.
SMART GROWTH
As an antidote to sprawl, compact urban development would place residential neighborhoods close to shops, local and intercity transportation, and other services. Reduced vehicle use could avoid almost 2 billion metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.
All You Need Is Love
I
B Y
S H A R M A N
WALK OUT OF MY HOUSE ONTO A COUNTRY ROAD.
If I go north three miles, I’ll be in the Gila National Forest, 3.3 million acres of pure southwestern New Mexico: ponderosa pine, piñon pine, scrub oak, juniper, yucca, prickly pear. These are familiar names and deeply comforting, like beads on a rosary. Mountain lion, black bear, elk, javelina, coatimundi, rattlesnake. If I go south four miles, I’ll hit Highway 180 and could find my way to anywhere, Albuquerque or Dallas or Los Angeles or New York. By God (and here comes my first imitation of Walt Whitman), I live in the best of places! The 5 0 onearth
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A P T
R U S S E L L
best of times! My pleasures as democratic as the cloud-tossed sky. I choose north, low hills of mesquite and shrub brush on my left, the cottonwoods of the Gila River on my right. In 30 minutes of fast walking I pass one, two, three houses of part-timers like myself, whose jobs or family commitments keep us from living in the Gila Valley year-round. It is the bane of country life: how to make money. I pass a dog barking in front of its double-wide trailer, the home of a husband and wife who work for the state highway department. Across the road from them, a sign reads “War is not the answer”; this is the gate to an intentional community where people live frugally—
MICHAEL BERMAN, COURTESY OF SCHEINBAUM & RUSSEK LTD., SANTA FE, NM
Soliphilia, topophilia, solastalgia: call it what you will, the sense of place is ingrained in most of us, even though it may take the most varied forms
HIGH COUNTRY Near the author’s New Mexico home, the Mogollon Mountains rise to more than 10,000 feet.
reducing, recycling, gardening—without jobs. Next to their compound is a rancher whose grandfather worked for the Forest Service here in 1907, when the Forest Service was still a new idea. As the asphalt gives way to dirt, I pass the driveway of a telecommuting editor originally from New York, an archaeological site (the mounds of a Mimbres village dating from about AD 500), a grazed-down field with a mule and two horses (perked ears and the slow amble over), and the barn of someone named Tex. This is the diversity of the rural West, perhaps of all rural America. Walt Whitman—poet of the carpenter, the deacon, the duck-shooter, the milkmaid, the stevedore, the crone—would have put us on one of his lists. We’re Baptists and pantheists; we eat beef and drink soy milk; we like wolves and hate wolves and we’re new and old and rich and poor. What we have in common is a feeling that some of us would be uncomfortable talking about, and some of us talk about all the time. We love this place. We are the bride of this place and we are the groom. The idea is so strange to contemporary culture that we need new words to describe it. The philosopher Glenn Albrecht, who coined the word solastalgia for the pain humans feel when their home environment is degraded or destroyed, is now promoting soliphilia,
from the Greek philia (“love of”), the French solidaire (“interdependent”), and the Latin solidus (“solid” or “whole”). Soliphilia, Albrecht says, is “the love of and responsibility for a place, bioregion, planet, and the unity of interrelated interests within it.” The term joins biophilia (love of living systems, described by the psychologist Erich Fromm in 1961 and later promoted by the biologist E. O. Wilson) and topophilia (from the Greek topos, or “place,” used by such mid-century poets as W. H. Auden and Alan Watts). [See Elizabeth Kolbert and E. O. Wilson, “The Human Factor,” p. 43.] When I was a college student majoring in environmental studies in the 1970s, we preferred mouthfuls like bioregionalism and ecopsychology and the mysterious-sounding deep ecology. All these neologisms built on the work of America’s first ecophilosophers, Thoreau and Emerson, who built in turn on earlier philosophers and world cultures. Indigenous voices swell the chorus. In the most modern version, we wonder now if “love of place” is hardwired. Can we find that spot in the brain? Make it light up the PET scan? And more pertinent, can we turn it up a notch? In less than an hour’s walk, I’m at the national forest boundary, looking down over fields of prickly pear and mesquite, an undulating rise WINTER 2011
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and fall of land lifting into the hills above the Gila River, rock eroded into giant cones or Stetson hats, and the cliffs rearing beyond them, the rimrock of Watson Mountain pink and orange and white. Then more grandeur, the bright blue New Mexican sky, a deep azure contrasting with the white and gray of a storm in the distance. My chest feels hollow, as though heart and lungs have evaporated. Within that emptiness, something flowers against the rib cage. A pressure, an ache. That’s how I feel my love. This only happens, of course, when I am paying attention. My body responds physically to the Gila Valley, most often to its expansive views, but also down in the irrigated pastures with the sleepy cows and the smell of alfalfa, and by the river with its modest flow, sunlight on water and the flap of a heron. Love of place opens me to the beauty of the world, which can be found everywhere, city and suburb, desert and rainforest. A world full of places that people love. Love of place makes me feel larger. When I open to the world, the boundaries of self, my worries and fears, what makes Sharman happy, what makes Sharman sad, the particulars of childhood and family, talents and flaws, that day in high school, this new pain in my knee—all of it diminishes against the lift of land, colors, and cliffs. I’m as big as this view, five miles wide. I’m as powerful as the gathering storm, but also calm. Time passes. Seasons turn. The river floods and changes everything, and then everything changes again. No worries. No flaws. Nothing is untoward. I feel grateful. I feel special. And then, because I am so very human and flawed, I feel smug. I’m so cool to live in this place. The cultural historian (or ecotheologist) Thomas Berry once described human consciousness as the universe reflecting on itself. The big bang, the birth of stars and planets, the evolution of life on earth and specifically of Homo sapiens resulted in a woman standing before this view of mountains and clouds. She notes her feelings: calm, blessed, self-congratulatory. Maybe the universe could have chosen more wisely, but let’s not spoil the moment. I’m in a women’s group that meets every six weeks. In rural areas we go to groups instead of entertainments like plays or concerts. The Gila Valley has gone through many different kinds of group’s: a men’s group and a couples’ group and a drumming circle and a book club, not to mention the Bible studies and entertainments of people I don’t know. In my newest art group we take turns leading one another in activities like painting with watercolors or weaving, a kind of playdate for the middle-aged. Today we’re exploring voice, or more accurately the different noises we can make with our throats and mouths. We’ve watched the YouTube videos, the exuberant ululation of Darfur refugees and the truly strange Mongolian throat singing—sustained harmonic thrums that represent, with different pitches and tones, particular landscapes. A deep, gurgling thrum 5 2 onearth
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for the river and forest. A more nasal vibration for the Gobi Desert. Expectantly, we look to our leader. She suggests we go out into nature and listen. We are sitting on my porch, and nature is the immediate yard around my house, irrigated fields below, canopied irrigation ditch behind. It is late summer, a time of year when we get most of our meager 12 inches of annual rain. The desert hills are green and the native sunflowers are a forest of tall, leafy stalks. We disperse, and when we return we each bring back a sound. One woman begins to duck and whine. A mosquito. Another drops her chin, extends it forward, opens her mouth wide, and blares. A bullfrog. Someone tries to buzz like a cicada but lacks the male’s drumlike membranes on the abdomen. Someone mimics a lizard rustling in grass. I do a high-pitched doo-wop version of the Western Meadowlark, trying to evoke that jaunty soul feeling if not the actual melody. We use our saliva to imitate the sound of water in the ditch. We hum with clenched teeth. A fly. Tongues curl against the roof of the mouth. The klock-klock of a raven. We tighten throat muscles. The skreeeeet of an insect. We put it all together. We think we sound pretty good. You laugh—but these women know their world. They have seen the cicada’s last molt, that slit in the nymph’s skin, the pale adult emerging like some spiritcreature unfurling transparent wings, the creepy brown shell left behind. They know the habits of foxes. They know which plants can be eaten and which are poisonous. They know how to grow food in heat and wind and plagues of grasshoppers. In their 10 or 20 or 30 years here, they have watched the night skies and hiked the trails and banded birds for scientific study and caught moths for the local entomologist. They’ve cleaned up trash along Box Canyon Road, monitored the highway department’s spraying of herbicide, and pulled up the invasive yellow star thistle by its determined taproot. Like most humans, they like novelty but not change. They want the weather to be predictable and the birds to keep to their familiar migrations. More personally, they don’t want to grow old or have their children leave home. They are searching for wisdom to know when change must be accepted and when it must not. They are looking for ways to live fully in this place. It’s all less wonderful than it sounds. For nearly 30 years, local environmentalists have held off the threat of a dam on the Gila River, successfully preserving the last free-flowing river in New Mexico. Today a dam or major diversion is again being considered, locally and at the state level, with the full support of some irrigators and farmers in the Gila Valley. From their perspective, southwestern rivers need to be controlled, their waters manipulated for human use. From my perspective, southwestern rivers need to flood, a natural process moving soil and seeds, braiding new channels, and providing habitat for native fish and other wildlife. Love of place doesn’t mean we agree about what is best for place.
Moreover, soliphilia has its own dangers, no matter your politics or worldview. Love of place can lead to xenophobia, with longtime residents resenting newcomers, even (perhaps especially) when they come with good ideas. Whether “old” or “new” to the rural West, we are all in danger of becoming provincial, caught up in the intricate pleasures of home and ignoring our connections to the rest of the world. Certainly we can’t retreat into our love of the Gila Valley—the descent of sandhill cranes in winter, that golden afternoon light on the fields like some blessing laid over the earth, a hand over our brow, a voice whispering beauty, beauty—and forget about the Gulf of Mexico or the Arctic Circle. Toxic chemicals, oil spills, global warming, invasive species. A stab of solastalgia! We can’t protect our best place without protecting them all.
MAP BY BAKER VAIL; ILLUSTRATION BY BRUCE MORSER
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N R D C IN PRAISE OF THE PRISTINE
AMY MALL Senior policy analyst based in Colorado, specializing in energy development and public lands protection
Why is it important to preserve public wildlands in the West?
OX CANYON ROAD DEAD-ENDS AT A FOREST
Service campground on the Gila River, a healthy riparian bosque of cottonwood, sycamore, and willow, lime green in spring, emerald green in summer, yellow in fall, gray in winter—not a dull gray, I want to emphasize, but a shimmering, luminous, evocative gray like the fur of animals or the layering of feathers, the gray of twilight in the interstices of branches. (Do I digress yet again? “Logic and sermons never convince,” Walt Whitman wrote. “The damp of the night drives deeper into my soul.”) Throughout the year, especially on weekends, the campground is well used. On any given Sunday I might find an extended family with coolers of tamales and burritos, high school kids secretly drinking, or a young couple on a romantic picnic. On some weekend walks, when I want to avoid being dusted by cars going to the campground, I’ll turn left after the home of the telecommuting editor onto a second dirt road, this one clearly signed “No Trespassing.” Fortunately I have permission to be here, on the private land of my neighbor, the rancher. Pretty regularly we happen to meet, he in his ATV checking stock tanks and gates, and me bipedaling with my day pack, water bottle, ChapStick, paper and pen, perhaps a snack, maybe a book I might read as I walk. (I do this sometimes on a country road. I have great peripheral vision and am less afraid, as I get older, of being seen as eccentric.) He always stops to talk. We always begin with the weather, a subject deeply satisfying to us both. We may stray into matters of personal health. Our adult children. Some local school event. For 30 years his wife taught at the nearby elementary school. For eight years I served on the school board. Twice he’s mentioned the apocalypse predicted by Revelations. I’ve tentatively broached climate change. At some point one of us usually says, “Well, it’s a beautiful morning,” motioning to the nearby sky and grass. We mean something a bit more than this. But that’s all we say. Coming back, I rejoin Box Canyon Road, headed for home now. The clouds seem to follow me, billowy white boats out for a sail. A mourning dove calls—perhaps my very favorite sound. A raven thocks from the top of a juniper. I think he’s thocking to me. When I stop, he gets huffy and flaps into the distance, awkward grace and deliberate speed, arrowing above the rolling hills dotted with more juniper, with mesquite and scrub brush, black against blue, higher and higher, rising and falling—until he is joined, I see now, by another raven. Until they disappear and only blue remains. My chest feels hollow. Sharman Apt Russell is a regular contributor to OnEarth. Her most recent book is Standing in the Light: My Life as a Pantheist (Basic Books).
The federal government manages these spectacular lands on our behalf, but they belong to the American people. They contain some of the most valuable wildlife habitat in our nation. They are places where we can find pure air and water, solitude, mind-blowing geologic formations, archaeological relics, herds of wild horses and pronghorn antelope. And yes, for some communities their natural resources also have important commercial value. Oil, mining, and logging companies can exploit the resources, but they don’t own the lands. The bottom line is that these lands are national treasures— for many different reasons that must be balanced wisely. People love these lands for all sorts of reasons. How can you build alliances among so many disparate interests?
It’s important to explore areas where we share common values and concerns, and NRDC reaches out to many who may not consider themselves environmentalists. A rancher wants land free of toxic waste so her cattle can remain healthy. A sportsman wants clean water and healthy fish. A business owner wants to prevent industrialization so that tourists will visit his community. We can agree to disagree on certain issues while focusing mutual efforts on the goals we share. Has much changed since the Obama administration took office?
The Bush administration made industrial development, such as intense oil and gas drilling, its top priority, but if this dominates large areas of wildlands, they will never be wild again. Wildlife habitat can be destroyed, migration corridors disrupted, clean air poisoned, and recreational opportunities can disappear. Many of the actions taken by the last administration were not only harmful but illegal, meaning we had to go to court. The Obama administration has announced some new policies that help ensure that natural values are appropriately considered, but more needs to be done. What can people do to help preserve our wildest lands?
Since you and I own these lands, we have a say in their management. Every time a decision is to be made about public lands, tell the managing agency what you think would be best for the fate of the land and wildlife. And become an NRDC BioGems defender to learn when there are opportunities to voice your views about the management of western wildlands.
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Reviews
WORDSIMAGESIDEAS
THE WORLD IN 2050 Four Forces Shaping Civilization’s Future BY LAURENCE C. SMITH Dutton Adult, 336 pp., $26.95
WINNERS AND LOSERS
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We live in a world of inequalities. Is climate change going to make them even worse? BY TIM FOLGER
Y THE END OF THIS DECADE WE WILL KNOW HOW HARSHLY HISTORY
will judge us. If we want to spare our descendants the worst effects of global warming, the world’s emissions of greenhouse gases will have to peak before 2020 and start declining thereafter. Tragically, we’re almost certain to miss that fateful deadline. At the December 2009 United Nations climate conference in Copenhagen, delegates from 192 nations failed to produce any legally binding agreement to reduce emissions. Blinded by ideology, willful ignorance, or perhaps simple selfishness, we’re tumbling headlong into a new era. Paul Crutzen, a Nobel laureate at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany, calls it the Anthropocene, from the Greek words for “man” and “recent,” to reflect the epochal impact human activities now have on the earth’s climate. So perhaps it’s a sign of the times when books start to appear that focus not on preventing or minimizing global warming but on how civilization might adapt to temperatures that probably have not existed on the planet for millennia. In The World in 2050, Laurence Smith, a professor of earth and space sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles, has written an informed, readable, and important account of where current trends will most likely lead us. Overall, the future he describes is not a happy one. The world’s poorest cities, particularly those of sub-Saharan Africa, will become more crowded, more desperate, and more danger-
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ously unstable. Droughts like the one that cost California roughly $500 million in lost agricultural revenue in 2009 alone may become the norm. But Smith also makes a credible case that, for a lucky few, global warming will not be all bad. Smith devotes relatively few pages to the world as it might be in 2050; much of his book is actually a remarkably comprehensive report on the state of the world today. The unifying theme, though, is that countries bordering the Arctic will not only adapt to climate change but thrive, even as much of the rest of the world confronts water shortages, coastal flooding, mass human migrations, and other calamities. The Arctic, measurements show, is heating up twice as fast as the rest of the globe: sunlight that ice once reflected back into space now gets absorbed by ever larger tracts of open ocean and exposed land. This meltdown will make it easier to access the Arctic’s vast natural resources, including some of the very fuels that stoke global warming. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that 30 percent of the world’s remaining natural gas and 13 percent of its untapped oil will be found in the Arctic. Chevron, ExxonMobil, and other companies have already snatched up drilling sites auctioned by the government of Greenland in waters where sea ice had until recently made the prospect of oil exploration all but impossible. Eight nations, Smith argues, stand to benefit as the Arctic melts: the United States (thanks to Alaska), Canada, Russia, Denmark (because of close ties to its former colony, Greenland),
PETER GUTTMAN/CORBIS
Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Iceland. These northern rim countries, or NORCs, as Smith calls them, will see an influx of investment; their long winters will become more tolerable, their water reserves more valuable; humans, plants, and animals will migrate north, seeking relief from the hot, crowded, waterstressed lower latitudes. Climate change won’t be the only factor driving the transformation. Smith includes three more forces in his short list of world-shapers: population growth, accelerating globalization, and humanity’s insatiable demand for natural resources. World population is projected to hit 9.2 billion in 2050, in effect squeezing two more Chinas onto the planet. Three huge economies—China, the United States, and India, with China being by far the largest—will dominate the world, competing for food, water, and energy. Although China and India won’t benefit from global warming, their economies will continue to grow, with per capita incomes in both countries likely to rise substantially. So will their energy consumption. Given that China today builds about two new coal-fired power plants every week—equivalent to adding another United Kingdom to the global energy grid every year— the prospects for a greener world 40 years from now look bleak indeed. In terms of where we get our energy, Smith writes, 2050 will look very much like 2010. We’ll still rely on coal, oil, and gas to supply most of our energy. Our continued reliance on fossil fuels for much of this century means many of the problems we face today will persist for decades, one of the most urgent being how to avoid dumping all the carbon we’ll still be using into the atmosphere. The increasing use of coal to replace dwindling supplies of oil and natural gas will be especially problematic. Unfortunately, we’re not developing alternatives aggressively
enough. Today, wind and solar combined supply barely 1 percent of the world’s electricity. Even with the greenest projections of future energy use, Smith writes, that contribution will increase at most to 30 percent in 2050. The United States will burn 40 percent more coal in 2050 than it does now; China’s consumption will double. Ultimately, the world economy will shift to renewable forms of energy (if for no other reason than all the oil, gas, and coal have gone up in smoke), but Smith sees no chance of that happening by 2050. Advocates of “clean coal” technology—and that includes President Barack Obama and other world leaders—are betting heavily that a nascent technology will eventually make it possible to capture, liquefy, and store all that carbon underground before it leaves any smokestacks. But Smith argues incisively that carbon-capture technology, as it’s called, may never work, at least not on a scale where it would make much of a difference. I wish every politician in the world would read at least these two sentences from this book: “The United States alone produces about 1.5 billion tons of CO2 per year from coal-fired power plants. Capturing and storing just 60 percent of that means burying 20 million barrels of liquid per day [my italics]—about the same as the country’s entire consumption of oil.” Even if we managed to build the enormous infrastructure to store so much carbon, Smith writes, an annual leakage rate of just 1 percent would, within a century, result in the escape of nearly two-thirds of the stored carbon into the atmosphere. We, or our great-grandchildren, would be back where we started. Smith doesn’t offer any near-term solutions to this problem, and it seems we have no choice but to push on and do our best to develop carbon-capture schemes. The climate models Smith
relies on for his predictions are improving steadily, but for now scientists can only bracket our future between best- and worstcase outcomes. At the optimistic end of the range, by the end of this century temperatures in the United States, Europe, and China will average about 4.5 degrees Fahrenheit higher than today. The pessimistic models predict an increase of 9 degrees Fahrenheit. As Smith emphasizes, that’s close to the increase we have experienced since the last ice age, 20,000 years ago. All the models predict that the earth’s northern latitudes will change substantially. One of the consequences of global warming is that drier areas will tend to become even drier while the wet regions become wetter. At the northernmost latitudes, lakes and seas will remain unfrozen for more months of the year, so evaporation—and precipitation—will increase in the Arctic.
f r o m
o u r
It will be one of the few parts of the world to enjoy a water surplus. And access to clean water, in Smith’s opinion, will be the greatest challenge of the twentyfirst century. It would remain a major problem even without climate change, he writes, because population growth and the spread of industrialization both place greater demands on water supplies than global warming does. Today, about 40 percent of the world’s population lack access even to simple latrines. Despite the prospect of severe water shortages for much of the world’s population later in this century, Smith believes it’s unlikely that any nations will actually go to war over water. Water, he argues, is too important to fight over. No country wants to risk losing access to water; the incentive to cooperate outweighs any potential benefits of a water war. To support his argument, Smith points out that Egypt, Israel,
c o n t r i b u t o r s
PHOTOGRAPHER J. HENRY FAIR’S SPECIALTY IS DESTRUCTION—
and the arresting images that often accompany it. Those shot from the air, especially, may even have their own kind of surreal, thought-provoking beauty. In the course of his career Fair has photographed mountaintops blasted apart by coal companies; the multicolored plumes of effluent that pour into lakes from pulp mills and phosphate mines; and the weird symmetries in storage impoundments of rust-red bauxite waste. After the Deepwater Horizon disaster, he spent a month making images like this one of drifting oil slicks in the Gulf of Mexico. J. HENRY FAIR’s The Day After Tomorrow: Images of Our Earth in Crisis will be published in January 2011 by Powerhouse Books.
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REVIEWS
Jordan, India, and Pakistan have all managed to avoid outright war when it comes to water. More probable than bloody conflicts, Smith suggests, will be the proliferation of enormous engineering projects to siphon northern water to the thirsty south. He says it’s very likely that long-dormant schemes, such as proposals to pump water from Canada’s James Bay watershed and to tap the rivers and lakes of Siberia, will shed
their near-crackpot status and become viable political options. And of course, oil, gas, or coal would be needed to power the pumps... So will oil and water mix in the Arctic, creating new wealth and opportunities in a region now inhabited mostly by Inuit, Sami, and other isolated native peoples? Is Smith’s optimism about the north’s future justified? He points to the growing political independence of Greenland, which is ruled by its aboriginal population, the Greenlandic Inuit. In Canada, the Inuit of Nunavut, a territory about the size of Mexico, are the country’s fastest-growing
population; already they’re collecting revenues from mining and oil companies. Smith believes the north will see more pipelines and ports, with oil, gas, and water flowing south and money north. “I see the original stewards of this land taking it back again,” he writes. Smith’s argument falters here. History does not contain many examples of indigenous peoples prospering when larger nations crave their resources. The Arctic future will likely play out in more complicated ways than Smith describes. In the summer of 2009, I spent three weeks in Greenland, meeting with politicians,
s p o t l i g h t
Wild Wonders of Europe By Peter Cairns, Florian Möllers, Staffan Widstrand, and Bridget Weinberg, Abrams, $50
When we think of spectacular wilderness, the images that usually come to mind are from places like Alaska and the Northern Rockies, the Himalayas and the Arctic. When we think of Europe, on the other hand, it’s more likely that our mental picture is of great, densely populated cities, of countryside buried under concrete and superhighways, interspersed perhaps with pockets of rural prettiness. But the continent also harbors rare natural wonders in countries to which we rarely give a passing thought. Who knew there were red rock badlands along the border between Georgia and Azerbaijan to rival anything in Wyoming? Or deep, eroded limestone canyons and blue-green rivers in Slovenia whose beauty matches that of their counterparts in Patagonia? Who dreamed of thousands of bison roaming primeval forests in Poland and Belarus? Schools of basking sharks along the coasts of Scotland? Thriving populations of once-endangered alpine ibex 30 miles from Turin, Italy? This photo, by the Finnish photographer Jari Peltomäki, shows a group of Dalmatian pelicans, sometimes described as the world’s heaviest flying birds, on Lake Kerkini in northern Greece.
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scientists, farmers, hunters, and fishermen. Oil wealth is still a distant dream, and more than a few people I spoke with worried that an Arctic boom may create more problems than it solves. Minik Rosing, a native Greenlander and one of the world’s leading geologists, told me that large-scale development in the Arctic could overwhelm the Inuit and other native groups. Greenland, for example, has fewer than 60,000 people—the entire population could fit in the Louisiana Superdome with thousands of seats to spare. Oil companies would inevitably need to bring in trained workers and support staff from elsewhere, and Rosing fears the Inuit could become a minority in their own land. “We’d have this dilemma: Should we have a work force that lives and works here with no civil rights, or should we have a workforce that has rights but would be a majority in Greenland?” he said. “I’m not saying it could not be done, but it’s not a free ride.” Some wealth will no doubt come to the people of the Arctic, as Smith writes, but at what cost to them and the rest of the world? Will “the original stewards of the land” be stewards no more? Wealth derived from the continued extraction of fossil fuels hardly seems consistent with stewardship. Smith acknowledges that any profits wrung from global warming in the north will be paid for with immense human suffering elsewhere—2050 doesn’t hold much promise for the world’s poor and powerless. The crisis posed by global warming, it seems, is in part a moral one: Can we in the developed world live with less? Is it preordained that our economies must expand the frontiers of globalization to the very highest latitudes on earth, regardless of cost? Cheap energy has made us wealthy, and maybe we can no longer afford to be so rich.
EELS By James Prosek Harper, 304 pp., $25.99
ILLUSTRATION BY BLAIR THORNLEY
GETTING MY YOUNG SON TO
fall asleep each night is an eternal struggle. But watching his favorite TV show with Dad helps him close his eyes, which is how I came to see an episode of “Curious George” in which the cartoon monkey tries to catch an American eel that has found its way into the local fishing pond. His goal is to return the eel to its native habitat, a nearby river, so it can swim to the ocean to spawn. But the subject of this noble effort strikes me as an unappealing choice for a children’s show. We’ve seen George encounter penguins, crickets, possums, and squirrels. But an eel? Eeeww. Though perhaps I’m being too harsh. James Prosek’s Eels: An Exploration, From New Zealand to the Sargasso, of the World’s Most Mysterious Fish made me reconsider my knee-jerk prejudice against an animal that I knew almost nothing about. Before picking up the book, I couldn’t have told you for sure whether the eel was a fish, a snake, or something entirely different. Turns out I’m not alone. Some tribes of the South Pacific still consider eels part-man, part-fish demigods. The ancient Romans suggested that eels and snakes interbred. A nineteenth-century
naturalist called the eel a missing link between purely aquatic and amphibious reptiles. But the freshwater eel is, in fact, a fish, albeit a very strange one. Eels are the anti-salmon—instead of being born in mountain streams and returning as adults to spawn, they go the other way, beginning their lives somewhere in the featureless ocean and somehow finding their way back to the same spot after decades in freshwater. An eel scientist tells Prosek that salmon, famed for their heroic upstream journeys, have it easy compared with eels. Young eels (known at this stage as glass eels) swim up rivers while still tiny and transparent, settling in lakes and ponds that often have no obvious connection to the sea. When it’s time to return, they can cross land during heavy rains and floods, using one another like bridges and even balling up into a single rolling mass. No one has seen a freshwater eel spawning in the wild. Until the late nineteenth century, no one was even sure eels had gender; their sex organs don’t appear until they return to the ocean. Because his subject is so mysterious, Prosek frames part of his book as a detective story, traveling the world in search of knowledge about his elusive prey. (He also provides etchings to illustrate his journey.) He helps build a weir to capture eels on the Delaware River, drinks the soporific sakau with the eel clan on the Micronesian island of Pohnpei, visits a slaughterhouse while celebrating Eel Day in Japan, and dons a wet suit to swim with five-foot-long New Zealand eels that bump against his snorkeling mask. Prosek seems to have fallen in love with the details of his investigation-—where he slept, whom he talked with, what he drank and ate. He spent 11 years researching the book, and it’s clear he couldn’t get enough eel stories; readers are unlikely to share his unlimited attention span. Sections of the
book, particularly when he visits New Zealand, begin to drag as Prosek faithfully relates one conversation after another about the native Maori’s taniwha, or guardian eels. (The title of one chapter, “More Tales of Taniwha,” might have been a sign to move on.) The spiritual significance of eels to island cultures is a key revelation in the book, but at several points the reader yearns for synthesis, not literal transcription. Ultimately, the larger story Prosek weaves about the eel is the most interesting in the book, and like almost any natural history written during our modern age, the eel’s tale is not a happy one. Like passenger pigeons and Newfoundland cod before them, eel populations in the past have been described as so vast they could never be diminished. We
know where this is headed: passenger pigeons are extinct, cod fisheries are devastated, and now eels are disappearing worldwide, beset by a multitude of factors including pollution, climate change, the Japanese appetite, and hydroelectric dams that crush them during migration. Yet an attempt to put eels on the U.S. endangered species list was rejected in 2007 because a steep decline does not equal imminent extinction. That the reader comes to care about the future of this alienlooking, slime-covered fish may be the ultimate testament to the power of Prosek’s eel stories. I still get that eeeww feeling, but I’m glad my son enjoys watching George help one find its way home—whatever dark, mysterious corner of the ocean that might be. —SCOTT DODD
Blizzard How did I get to this amazing country, where all things are concealed? In a zinc-white blur, pines are not pines, their branches are under down; cedars wobble with the weight of it; and harlequin trunks, hooded azaleas (or whatever, in disguise) ignore me as I watch millions of six-pointed flakes drift into a mass, hiding the road. Exile begins with the unfamiliar: now a missed elm, now words that fail. In the window pane, my face is gone. My body’s lighter. I’ve lost my name. Feathers fly, but no birds. Wait. Those silvery things out there are angels, singing as the wind sings, out of tune. Silence now. Blank sky. It’s dark at four. Blizzard, send an angel down to wrestle me in this pale air, breathe life into my throat. Let a tough angel crack the roof and shake me with blessings. I’d trudge out into day with new eyes, a new name, and song.
—By Grace Schulman
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DISPATCHES NEWS AND VIEWS FROM THE NATURAL RESOURCES DEFENSE COUNCIL
A COOLER KITCHEN A new generation of refrigerators will yield big savings in energy and electric bills.
BUILDING THE SUPER EFFICIENT HOME
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NRDC and a group of manufacturers endorse higher energy standards for tomorrow’s household appliances N A FEW YEARS, WHEN YOU GO OUT TO BUY AN
environment-friendly refrigerator, clothes washer, or dishwasher, your search may be a lot easier. Thanks in part to a new agreement among the Association of Home Appliance Manufacturers (AHAM), NRDC, and other environmental and energy-efficiency organizations, a number of household appliances will use less energy than ever—no matter what brand or style you purchase. The Energy Efficient and Smart Appliance Agreement of 2010, signed July 30, was originally proposed by AHAM, which sought out NRDC and other stakeholders to negotiate the terms. The industry group represents such companies as Whirlpool, GE, Electrolux, and Friedrich, which were eager to finalize new energy-efficiency rules rather than wait for the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) to complete
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a lengthy rulemaking process to update standards. “With one agreement, the companies have specific targets and specific timetables that they know they can meet,” says Ed Osann, a senior policy analyst who served on NRDC’s negotiating team. In 1987 NRDC spearheaded similar negotiations that led to the National Appliance Energy Conservation Act, which first set minimum efficiency standards for appliances and gave DOE the responsibility to review them periodically. These standards have since helped U.S. consumers save more than $200 billion on their utility bills and cut electricity use nationwide by 5 percent. The new minimum efficiency levels cover a wide range of appliances, including freezers, clothes dryers, and room air conditioners, and would go into effect over the next three to eight years. The updated standards are more stringent than current ones for all appliances
covered under the agreement. Dryers will be required to use 5 percent less energy, while clothes washers will have to use up to 40 percent less energy; changes to standards for other appliances fall somewhere in the middle. Clothes washers and dishwashers will also be required to use less water than is currently allowed—up to 50 percent less for clothes washers. Over the next 30 years, the accumulated energy savings will equal the energy needed to power 40 percent of American homes for one year, and the water saved could supply Los Angeles with water for 25 years. While the standards are not yet legally binding, DOE has already proposed new standards for refrigerators and freezers that mirror those in the 2010 agreement. The improvements just for those appliances could save American consumers up to $18.6 billion on their energy bills over 30 years, and the agency has indicated it will follow suit on guidelines for other appliances. “Having this agreement makes it a lot easier for everyone involved,” says Meg Waltner, an en-
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ergy-efficiency advocate at NRDC who helped negotiate the new standards. “DOE can put them out there knowing that the main stakeholders have already agreed to what they’re proposing.” Kevin Messner, a vice president at AHAM, hopes “to get legislation enacted that would provide a little more certainty that DOE would have to follow these agreements.” Senator Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico, who introduced such a bill in September, described DOE appliance standards as “one of the most powerful tools our nation has to reduce energy demand.” NRDC and other parties to the 2010 negotiations also plan to push Congress to update tax incentives for manufacturers that boost production of super-efficient appliances, although manufacturing those products will pose challenges. “To get these credits, manufacturers will have to meet significantly higher performance levels,” Osann says. “These are really the products of tomorrow.” NRDC, its NGO partners, and the manufacturers’ group have also agreed to petition the Environmental Protection Agency to provide a credit for products with “smart” capabilities as part of the eligibility criteria for the agency’s Energy Star program. Such products could interact with utilities to power down automatically at times when the utilities are facing peak energy demand. According to AHAM, the new efficiency standards and tax incentives could help retain more than 46,000 U.S. manufacturing jobs, as appliance companies retool to produce more efficient components, such as better insulation, seals, compressors, and temperature controls for refrigerators, Waltner says. Adds Osann, “That these manufacturers sought us out to enter into a comprehensive agreement demonstrates NRDC’s credibility and continued expertise in this area.” —GENEVRA PITTMAN
GOOD RECIPE FOR THE PLANET
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NVIRONMENTAL ACTIVIST, NRDC TRUSTEE, AND An Inconvenient Truth producer Laurie David has published a new book, The Family Dinner: Great Ways to Connect With Your Kids, One Meal at a Time (Grand Central Publishing, $29.99; or go to thefamilydinnerbook.com). Overflowing with recipes by Kirstin Uhrenholdt, life lessons, and advice from David’s famous friends, the book aims to draw us back to the table and keep us there long past dessert. She recently sat down with OnEarth to discuss her ideas.You can read the complete interview at onearth.org/article/laurie-david-interview. What was your inspiration for this book? I had an epiphany one night sitting at the kitchen table with my kids. I realized that I was reaping the benefits of all the years of our family dinner ritual: even though my kids were now in their teens, they were still coming to the table every night and staying long after dessert. That realization was soon followed by another: that all the issues I care about cross the dinner plate, including raising healthy kids, what we’re eating, how it’s grown, and what we’re wasting. HOME COOKING
You cite surprising reLaurie David praises family mealtimes. search indicating that family dinner not only fosters healthy eating habits but also boosts kids’ self-esteem, grades, and confidence. Can you explain? The research is really staggering: all the things a parent worries about can be improved by sitting down to dinner. The fact that there has been a huge increase in health problems at the same time there has been a decline in family dinners is no coincidence. What is amazing about the dinner table is how much is actually going on—how much your children are learning that we’re not even aware of. For a lot of families, cooking every night can seem overwhelming. Heat-and-eat is so easy. How do we break that habit? Start with a couple home-cooked meals a week. You’ll see. They’ll be your favorites, and you’ll want more. Also, it doesn’t have to be a three-course meal. Takeout once in a while is fine—just make it healthy takeout. Put everything in bowls, set the table, and sit down together. The act of making that time special is what matters. As an environmentalist, you take up the issue of America’s meat consumption. You offer lots of reasons and delicious ways to reduce it, but does it really matter what a few consumers do? It’s shocking, but we are eating 500 percent more chicken than our grandparents did. In their day, meat was a once-a-week treat. Today, many of us are eating it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. It’s unhealthy and completely unsustainable. There are so many other great sources of protein. That’s why there’s a whole chapter in the book called “Meatless Mondays.” Try some of the recipes in that chapter, and I guarantee you won’t miss meat.
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BETWEEN THE LINES
Cleaner Cars That Cost Less at the Pump
In October, at the request of President Obama, the Environmental Protection Agency and the Department of Transportation extended a national program to strengthen fuel efficiency and greenhouse gas standards on all passenger vehicles built between 2017 and 2025; they will likely be strengthened again for cars built after 2025. The plan will build on national fuel and emission standards that will apply to model years 2012-2016.
According to the two government agencies, consumers of clean vehicles meeting the 6 percent, or 62 miles-per-gallon, standard in 2025 would save enough money at the pump to pay back the increased cost of the vehicle in 4.2 years or less. Fortunately, the technology we need to get these results is already within our grasp.
Luke Tonachel Air and Energy, NY
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With these future savings in mind, recent polls show that 74 percent of consumers favor federal standards that require passenger cars to meet a 60 miles-pergallon average, while 83 percent of consumers are willing to spend an extra $3,000 on their vehicle, knowing that they would make that money back within four years.
Suzanne Struglinski Legislative Media, DC
With vehicle life span reaching as much as three decades, the 2025 vehicles would save us around a billion barrels of oil. This improvement in fuel economy reduces our dependence on foreign oil and strengthens national security: the higher our cars’ fueleconomy standards, the less oil we need to import.
This extension would not have been possible without California’s original 2002 Pavley Clean Cars Law, which aimed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from automobiles by 30 percent, thereby increasing passenger vehicle fuel efficiency to about 35 miles per gallon, in all models by the year 2016.
Deron Lovaas Air and Energy, DC
Roland Hwang Air and Energy, SF
Earth Protector THE NATURAL WORLD LOST AN
innovative and dedicated advocate when Francis W. Hatch died on April 8 at age 84. In 1965, while serving as a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, Hatch wrote the Massachusetts Wetlands Protection Act. Now commonly referred to as the Hatch Act, it was the first wetlands protection law in the country. After serving in the Massachusetts House for 16 years, Hatch became chairman of the Conservation Law Foundation, which works to solve environmental problems affecting New England. For 10 years, Hatch led the foundation’s advocacy work in state legislatures and in the courts. Under his leadership, for instance, the foundation sued the Massachusetts Department of Conservation to compel it to clean up Boston Harbor so it would be in compliance with federal and state clean water laws. Hatch was a member of the NRDC Board of Trustees for 30 years. Among many accomplishments during his tenure, he helped the organization form a partnership with Maine People’s Alliance to successfully sue Mallinckrodt Inc. for dumping mercury in the Penobscot River. The case not only was a major victory for NRDC but also set an important legal precedent that holds corporations liable for pollution downriver from an industrial plant. Moreover, the suit helped restore a river that Hatch loved and rowed regularly. “Frank Hatch was a quiet, persistent hero in the environmental movement,” says Mitch Bernard, director of litigation for NRDC. —MICHAEL G. EASTER
LEFT: FRANCES LOVAAS (LOVAAS); SUNG HWANG (STRUGLINSKI); ABOVE: WHITNEY HATCH
sources California Air Re d an es ci en ag e Th tential scenarios for po ur fo ed ss se as d ls, Boar eenhouse gas leve gr e ag er av de wi of 3 fleetns in the range io ct du re 2 CO al with annu d be equivyear, which woul r pe t en rc pe 6 to year (MY) mpg … for model 62 to 47 to t alen vehicles … 2025 light-duty s experisavings consumer Due to the fuel proved vehicles with im ng si ha rc pu by vings ence lifetime owner sa t ne e th y, om on pefuel ec 00, or a payback ,4 $7 to 00 ,0 $5 would be egate fuel 2 years… The aggr s would riod of 1.4 to 4. by these scenario ed ev hi ac ns io ct redu s over 3 billion barrel 1. to 7 0. om fr range . MY 2025 vehicles the lifetime of d range s reductions woul ga se ou nh ee gr l Tota over the llion metric tons mi 0 59 to 0 34 from 25 vehicles… lifetime of MY 20
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SWITCHBOARD:// ONLINE NEWS ANALYSIS SWITCHBOARD
http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/eshope/tar_sands_putting_our_waters_i.html A PROPOSED PIPELINE, called Keystone XL, would carry oil from tar sands—a source of petroleum that is expensive, difficult, and environmentally damaging to extract— from Alberta, Canada, all the way to refineries on the Gulf of Mexico, in part for export to other countries. The pipeline would threaten local water sources all along its length, especially in the Great Plains, where it would travel across one of our nation’s most important aquifers. Elizabeth Shope, an associate advocate in NRDC’s Washington, D.C., office who is working full-time to limit industrial development of tar sands, explains just how dangerous this pipeline would be.
The proposed pipeline would carry up to 900,000 barrels per day of dirty tar sands oil … 2,000 miles from Alberta to U.S. Gulf Coast refineries. Oil extracted from tar sands is a high-carbon fuel that causes environmental catastrophes at every stage: where it is extracted; where it is piped across rivers, farmland, and aquifers; where it is refined; and where it is burned around the world by increasing climate-change pollution.
On its long journey from Alberta through Montana, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas, this pipeline would be built right over—and in some places in—the Ogallala Aquifer, which is the primary source of drinking water for millions of Americans and provides 30 percent of the groundwater used for irrigation in the United States Canadian company TransCanada has already had three leaks from the recently built Keystone Pipeline in the few months that it has been running. A spill into the Ogallala Aquifer could have devastating water contamination effects. And to run the pipeline at capacity, the company would have to expand tar sands extraction, further polluting the waters in Canada. Tar sands development is a travesty: the tar-like bitumen requires large amounts of energy and water to extract it, and it is so dirty that refining it causes more pollution than refining conventional oil. The first step to stopping its production is saying no to the Keystone XL pipeline.
SHOW US YOUR NATURE
SOUTH AMERICAN BEAUTY During his lunch breaks at the Federal University of Sergipe in Brazil, Adilson Cruz Andrade enjoys taking leisurely walks around the campus looking for exceptional flora to photograph. On this spring day, he came upon a beautiful Mussaenda erythrophylla, a plant native to Africa.
The Yale Four FOUR CO-FOUNDERS OF NRDC
received the Yale Law School Association Award of Merit, the school’s highest honor, during its recent Alumni Weekend in October: James Gustave Speth, former dean of the Yale School of Forestry; Richard Ayres of the Washington, D.C.-based Ayres Law Group; Edward Strohbehn, a partner in the Washington and San Francisco offices of Bingham McCutchen; and John Bryson, former CEO of Edison International, the California utility company. All four recipients graduated from Yale Law School in 1969. The four received the award for their role in what started as an idea discussed over a meal in a Yale campus cafeteria and eventually led to the founding of NRDC in 1970. The award also cited their involvement in strengthening some of the country’s landmark environmental legislation, such as the Clean Air Act. Robert Post, dean of Yale Law School, told the recipients, “NRDC has affected legislation and judicial decision-making in all areas of environmental law. It has influenced research, policy analysis, litigation, lobbying, and education. Each of you has enjoyed an extraordinary career in environmental law.” Previous recipients of the Award of Merit include Bill Clinton, Sonia Sotomayor, and Byron White. The four honorees all pledged to continue their fight for the environment. “We’ve made tremendous progress in the last 40 years,” Ayers noted. “Our air is cleaner, our water is cleaner, and people are more environmentally conscious. Yet the biggest threats are still ahead of us. I would have hoped that I could be retired right now, that there’d be nothing more to do to help the environment, but we will con—M.G.E tinue our work.”
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fieldwork
WHO WE ARE
WHAT WE DO
other cities and towns, Fisk urged citizens and council members not to lock themselves into buying dirty power for a half-century. At Fisk’s suggestion, Cleveland hired an independent consultant, who reported that the purchase agreement would be a “death spiral” for the city’s public utility. For two years Fisk traveled around Ohio, attending council meetings and holding press conferences to try to prevent AMP from signing enough 50-year agreements to finance the construction of the plant. One after
vard Law School’s class of 1999. When Fisk joined NRDC, his first area of focus was ballast water, which large commercial ships take on and discharge to balance their heavy loads, a process that has brought scores of harmful invasive species into the Great Lakes. But as the number of proposals for new coal-fired power plants grew, Fisk was asked to redirect his attention. Since then, more than 100 proposed plants have been canceled, thanks in part to lawsuits filed by Fisk and his NRDC colleagues as well as
OUT WITH THE OLD Shannon Fisk teams up with locals to fight fossil fuel pollution.
CHICAGO’S NEW MAN In the fight against climate change, NRDC harnesses the power of America’s heartland to stop dirty coal
T
BY KARI LYDERSEN
HREE YEARS AGO SHANNON FISK AND HIS
colleagues in NRDC’s Midwest office set out to challenge a proposal by American Municipal Power (AMP) to build a massive coal-fired plant in Meigs County, Ohio. “People told us not to bother,” Fisk remembers. “They said, ‘You can’t beat a coal plant in Ohio. That’s coal country.’ ” But Fisk was undeterred. The self-described workaholic joined NRDC’s Midwest team as a senior attorney in the spring of 2007, shortly after the organization opened an office in Chicago to tackle precisely the sort of challenge posed by the AMP project. To secure financing, AMP needed its member utilities in Ohio to commit to 50-year power purchase agreements. At city council meetings in Cleveland, Oberlin, Yellow Springs, Westerville, and
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another, municipalities and utilities turned AMP down, and the company was left with no choice but to scuttle the proposed plant. “You’ve got to have staying power,” says Fisk, surrounded by boxes of legal documents and piles of paperwork in his office overlooking the Chicago River. This is his Batcave, he jokes—the place from which he fights to avert environmental harm and push the nation toward a cleaner, more efficient, more sustainable future. Born in Chicago, Fisk spent much of his childhood in Arkansas before moving to Michigan. It was there, in high school chemistry class, that his interest in environmental law was sparked. His chemistry teacher had left a lucrative position with Dow Chemical to do something he cared about. Fisk decided that he too wanted a career in line with his values. He went on to study political science at the University of Michigan and eventually earned a spot in Har-
other environmental groups. Today, with fewer coal-fired plants on the drawing board, Fisk has begun to focus on improving the aging plants that already exist. He is also keeping an eye on the country’s first liquefied-coal-todiesel plant, planned for Wellsville, Ohio. The technology turns solid coal into a gas, which is then compressed into a liquid that can be transported and burned in lieu of traditional diesel fuel. It’s a heavily polluting and extremely expensive process. Even though the plant is struggling to obtain financing, Fisk believes the battle is far from over. “This plant would create a new use for coal in this country,” Fisk says. “We can’t let that happen.” As in the past, he plans to turn to local communities for support. “We have the opportunity to harness the power of the heartland to address climate change. If we can’t do that, nothing else matters.”
LEFT: PHOTOGRAPH FOR ONEARTH BY WAYNE CABLE; RIGHT: RON LEONETTI
“People told us not to bother,” Fisk remembers. “They said, ‘You can’t beat a coal plant in Ohio. That’s coal country.’ ” But Fisk was undeterred.
NRDC BOARD OF TRUSTEES
John H. Adams Founding Director, NRDC; Chair, Open Space Institute
Arjun Gupta Founder and Managing Partner, Telesoft Partners
Daniel R. Tishman Chair; Chair and CEO, Tishman Construction Corp. of New York
Richard E. Ayres The Ayres Law Group
Van Jones* Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress; Senior Policy Advisor, Green for All
Frederick A.O. Schwarz, Jr. Chair Emeritus; Chief Counsel, Brennan Center for Justice; Senior Counsel, Cravath, Swaine & Moore, L.L.P. Adam Albright Vice Chair; private investor; environmentalist Patricia Bauman Vice Chair; Co-director, Bauman Foundation
A BIG LIFT
Robert J. Fisher Vice Chair; Director, Gap, Inc.
Sally Reahard, one of NRDC’s earliest supporters, made her first gift—$10—in 1972. John Adams, NRDC’s founding director, recalls: “We began our membership program with a handful of people like Sally who believed in us.” For the next three decades Reahard made annual gifts to NRDC, generally less than $45, but always on time to renew her membership. In 1977 she wrote to Adams, telling him that she had put NRDC in her will, hoping it might give him “a lift” to know. She thought NRDC’s share was worth about $25,000. In fact, when Reahard died at age 95 in 2003, the value of her estate’s gift to NRDC had grown to exceed $1.5 million. The Indianapolis pharmaceutical company heiress left more than $94 million to charities, with most of it going to protect land in Indiana, such as the Swamp Angel Nature Preserve in Noble County, and to save coastal wetlands in the Carolinas, Georgia and Virginia, including 350,000 acres of undeveloped estuary in South Carolina. Sally Reahard steadfastly supported NRDC’s efforts to defend wild lands from unnecessary development. Now her bequest will help protect America’s last wild places for decades to come.
Alan Horn Vice Chair; President and COO, Warner Brothers
IF YOU WOULD LIKE MORE INFORMATION
about how to include NRDC in your estate plans, please contact Michelle Quinones, Senior Gift Planning Specialist, at 212-727-4552 or at legacygifts@nrdc.org.
Joy Covey Treasurer; President, Beagle Foundation
HONORARY TRUSTEES Dean Abrahamson, M.D., Ph.D. Professor Emeritus, Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota Robert O. Blake U.S. Ambassador (retired) Henry R. Breck** Partner, Heronetta Holdings, Inc., L.L.C.
Anna Scott Carter Consultant, NRDC; environmentalist Susan Crown Principal, Henry Crown and Company; executive, foundation chairman, community activist Laurie P. David Producer; activist Leonardo DiCaprio Actor; environmentalist John E. Echohawk Executive Director, Native American Rights Fund Bob Epstein Co-founder, Sybase, Inc.; Co-founder, Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2); organizer and director, New Resource Bank
Philip B. Korsant Managing Member, Korsant Partners, L.L.C. Nicole Lederer Co-founder, Environmental Entrepreneurs (E2) Michael Lynton* Chairman and CEO, Sony Pictures Entertainment Shelly B. Malkin Landscape painter; conservationist Mary Moran* NRDC Global Council Member Josephine A. Merck Artist; founder, Ocean View Foundation
Wendy K. Neu Senior Vice President, Hugo Neu Corp.; grassroots community organizer and activist Frederica Perera, Ph.D. Professor, Columbia University; Director, Columbia Center for Children’s Environmental Health Robert Redford Actor; director; conservationist Laurance Rockefeller Conservationist Jonathan F. P. Rose President, Jonathan Rose Companies, L.L.C. Thomas W. Roush, M.D. Private investor; environmental activist Philip “Pete” Ruegger III Chair, Executive Committee, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, L.L.P. Christine H. Russell, Ph.D. Environmentalist; foundation director
Michel Gelobter, Ph.D. Founder, CEO, Cooler, Inc.
Peter A. Morton Chairman/founder, 510 Development Corp.
Joan K. Davidson Former Parks Commissioner, N.Y. State; President Emerita, The J.M. Kaplan Fund
Charles E. Koob Partner, Simpson Thacher & Bartlett, L.L.P.
Michael A. McIntosh, Sr. President, The McIntosh Foundation
Ruben Kraiem Partner, Covington and Burling
Daniel Pauly Director, Fisheries Centre, University of British Columbia
Sylvia Earle, Ph.D. Chair, Deep Ocean Exploration and Research, Inc. James B. Frankel Attorney; conservationist Hamilton F. Kean Attorney; conservationist
Burks B. Lapham Chair, Concern, Inc. Jonathan Z. Larsen Journalist Maya Lin** Artist/designer
William H. Schlesinger President, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies Wendy Kirby Schmidt President, The Schmidt Family Foundation; founder, The 11th Hour Project James Gustave Speth Professor of Law, Vermont Law School; Distinguished Senior Fellow, Demos Max Stone Managing Director, D.E. Shaw & Co., L.P. James Taylor Singer/songwriter Gerald Torres Bryant Smith Chair, University of Texas Law School Elizabeth Wiatt Environmentalist; founder, Leadership Council George M. Woodwell,Ph.D. Founder, Woods Hole Research Center
*New Board Member as of December 9, 2010
Nathaniel P. Reed Businessman; conservationist Cruz Reynoso Professor of law, UC Davis John R. Robinson Attorney
John Sheehan United Steelworkers of America (retired) David Sive Sive, Paget & Riesel, P.C. (retired) Frederick A. Terry, Jr. Senior Counsel, Sullivan & Cromwell Thomas A. Troyer Member, Caplin & Drysdale Kirby Walker Independent fi lm/ video producer
**New Honorary Member as of December 9, 2010
NRDC Staff PRESIDENT Frances Beinecke EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Peter H. Lehner DEPUTY DIRECTOR Patricia F. Sullivan PROGRAM STAFF Wesley Warren, director; Action Fund: Matthew Howes, Corry McKee; Advocacy: Lisa Catapano, Apolinar Gonzales, Erik Laaken, Andrea Martin, Ann Notthoff, Robert Perks, Victoria Rome, Melissa Waage; Air & Energy: Dale Bryk, director; Evelyn Arevalo, Jamy Bacchus, Kaid Benfield, Terry Black, Uchenna Bright, Pierre Bull, Sheryl Carter, Ralph Cavanagh, Brandi Colander, Emily Davis, Donna C. DeCostanzo, Pierre Delforge, Natisha Demko, Amanda Eaken, Lara Ettenson, Deborah Faulkner, Rishi Garg, Meleah Geertsma, David Goldstein, Nathanael Greene, Kristin E. Grenfell, Ashok Gupta, Justin Horner, Noah Horowitz, Roland Hwang, Alexander Jackson, Richard Kassel, Kit Kennedy, Elizabeth Landeros, Noah Long, Daniel Lorch, Deron Lovaas, Luis Martinez, Sierra Martinez, Peter Miller, Simon Mui, Colin C. O’Brien, Colin Peppard, James Presswood, Marissa Ramirez, Laura E. Sanchez, Thomas Singer, Brian Siu, Luke Tonachel, John Walke, Sharianne Walker, Margaret Waltner, Devra Wang, Samantha Wilt, Carl Zichella; Center for Market Innovation: Peter Malik, director; Judith Albert, Sarah Brailey, Diane Doucette, John Hale, Philip Henderson, Jennifer Henry, Kevin Levy, Christine Luong, Sandra Lyutse, Yerina Mugica, Douglass Sims, Cai Steger, Samir Succar, Alisa Valderrama, Starla Yeh; China: Barbara Finamore, director;, Hoober Hu, Gao Jie, Ruidong Jin, Hyoung Mi Kim, Ping Li, Yang Li, Yuqi Li, Alvin Lin, Zixin Lin, Mingming Liu, Jingjing Qian, Alex Wang, Sean Wang, Christine Xu, Xiaoli Yan, Chenxi Yang, Mona Yew, Anne Zhang, Xiya Zhang, Yao Zheng; Climate Center: Daniel Lashof, director; Radha Adhar, David Hawkins, Patricia F. Sullivan Chair for Environmental Policy; Peter Altman, Christina Angelides, Jamie Consuegra, David Doniger, Jennifer Emerson, Antonia Herzog, Laurie Johnson, Elizabeth Martin, George Peridas, Theo Spencer, John Steelman, Lucy SwiechLaFlamme; Government Affairs: David Goldston, director; Kellie Cutrer, Lauren Zingarelli; Health: Linda Greer, director and George W. Woodwell Chair for Environmental Science; Diane Bailey, Dana Gunders, Sarah Janssen, Jonathan Kaplan, Avinash Kar, Susan Keane, Kim Knowlton, David Lennett, Daniel Rosenberg, Miriam Rotkin-Ellman, Jennifer Sass, Gina Solomon, Suzanne Vyborney, Monique Waples, Mae Wu; International: Jacob Scherr, director; Heather Allen, Arias Carlota, Elizabeth BarrattBrown, Susan Casey-Lefkowitz, Cecilia Herrera, Anjali Jaiswal, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Amanda Maxwell, Shravya Reddy, Jake Schmidt, Elizabeth Shope; Land: Sharon Buccino, director; Johanna Wald, Leonard and Sandy Sargent Chair in Western Public Lands; Janet Barwick, Charles Clusen, Sylvia Fallon, Debbie Hammel, Nathaniel Lawrence, Amy Mall, Franz Matzner, Bobby McEnaney, Helen O’Shea, Rebecca Riley, Justin Sherman, Matthew Skoglund, Louisa Willcox, Craig Dylan Wyatt, Sami Yassa, Carl Zichella; Legislative Affairs: Richie Ackerman, Genevieve Parshalle, Scott Slesinger; Litigation: Mitch Bernard, director; Allison Clements, corporate counsel; Aaron Colangelo, Selena Kyle, Ben Longstreth, Nancy Marks, Lucia Roibal, Aaron Schaer, Joya Sonnenfeldt, Michael Wall, Vivian Wang; Midwest Regional: Henry L. Henderson, director; Ann Alexander, Amrita Batra, Joshua Berman, Thomas Cmar, Jennifer Daly, Shannon Fisk, Melissa Lupo, Nicholas Magrisso, Nancy Metzger, Rebecca Stanfield, Dylan Sullivan, Nancy Watson, Andrew Wetzler; Nuclear: Christopher Paine,
director; Thomas B. Cochran, Wade Greene Chair for Nuclear Policy; Geoffrey Fettus, Matt McKinzie, Jonathan McLaughlin, Robert S. Norris; Oceans: Lisa Speer, director; Jonathan Alexander, Seth Atkinson, Alison Chase, Sarah Chasis, Karen Garrison, Thomas Hayes, Marisa Kaminski, Lawrence Levine, Amy Macaux, Leila Monroe, Regan Nelson, David Newman, Bradford Sewell, Lindsi Seegmiller, Lisa Suatoni, Marina Zaiats; Science Center: Nathan Sandwick; Urban: Mark Izeman, East Coast director, and Joel Reynolds, West Coast director; Lisa Copland, Johanna Dyer, Linda Escalante, Jessica Esposito, Eric Goldstein, Gregory Gould, Lizzeth Henao, Allen Hershkowitz, Darby Hoover, Albert Huang, Michael Jasny, Taryn Kiekow, Adriano Martinez, Robin Marx, Damon Nagami, Melissa Lin Perrella, David R. Pettit, Penny Primo, Laurance Rockefeller, Richard Schrader, Gopi Shah, Kate Sinding, Steven Smith, Elinor Tarlow, Jessica Wall, Morgan Wyenn; Water: David Beckman, director; Ronnie Cohen, Jon Devine, Steven Fleischli, Noah Garrison, Andy Gupta, Rebecca Hammer, Karen Hobbs, Carol James, Michelle Mehta, Barry Nelson, Douglas Obegi, Katherine Poole, Monty Schmitt; COMMUNICATIONS Phil Gutis, director; Cathryn Bales, Ynés Cabral, Anthony Clark, Robert Deans, Alba Garzon, Lisa Goffredi, Sherry Goldberg, Courtney Hamilton, Elizabeth H. Heyd, Daniel Hinerfeld, Serena Ingre, Francesca Koe, Jennifer Lam, Jessica Lass, Kathryn McGrath, Joshua Mogerman, Jennifer Powers, Adrianna Quintero-Somaini, Kimberly Ranney, Auden Shim, Katherine Slusark, Suzanne Struglinski, William Tam, Lisa Whiteman, Eric W. Young; onearth Douglas S. Barasch, editor-in-chief; George Black, Scott Dodd, Janet Gold, Megan M. Teixeira, Laura Wright; DEVELOPMENT John Murray, director; Gina A. Abramo, Coretta Anderson, Spencer Campbell, John Cavanagh, Jennifer Chapin, Elizabeth Corr, Justin Courter, Lauren Craft, Lasans Crawford, Maria DeRiggi, Caitlin Driscoll, Sarah Edwards-Schmidt, Travis Eisenbise, Robert Ferguson, Katherine Gibson, Nancy Golden, Shari Greenblatt, Courtney Gross, Ashley Honeysett, Rita Itwaru, Patrick Kiely, Ying Li, Kelly McGonigle, Elizabeth McNulty, Peter Meysenburg, Michelle Mulia-Howell, Emily O’Neill, Shaniqua Outlaw, Matthew Perrin, Caroline Pronovost, Michelle Quinones, Carlita Salazar, Lynne Shevlin, Missy Toney, Tammy Tran, Julie Truax, Steve Van Landingham, Catherine Vega, Nicole Verhoff, Desrene Walton, Marian Weber, Marianna Weis, Joyce Wong; Membership: Linda Lopez, director; Jean Bowman, Darlene Davis, Lillian Fernandez, Amy Greer, Alex Hernandez, Katharine Houston, Jordan Kessler, Jennifer Lam, Adrianne Prettyman, Gina Trujillo, Marie Weinmann, Joyce Yeung; FINANCE AND OPERATIONS Judith Keefer, director; Finance: Hiawatha Barno, Annette Canela, Chun Cheng, Dorothy Clune, Jeff Cruz, Kathy Eason, James Hands, Sharon Hargrove, Lauretta Hoffler, Eunice Jean-Paul, Alex Liu, Shih-Chang Lu, Apurva Muchhala, Vivek Nadarajah; Administration: Jackie Albarran, Sonah Allie, Umar Al-Uqdah, Sasha Alleyne, Brian Anderson, Lauren Bern, Larisa Bravette, Anita Brennan, Willa Bugnon, Angela Calderon, William Christie, Tianya Coachman, Matthew Cohen, Genie Colbert, Angeliki Ebbesen, Leslie Edmond, Matthew Eisenson, Mimose Elie, Mercedes Falber, Rachel Fried, Sevi Glekas, Brian Gourley, Molly Greenwood, Anthony Guerrero, Sung Hwang, Brian James, Rodrigo Jaramillo, Leslie Jones, Valerie Keane, Vera Korol, Rene Leni, Shelly Lyser, Felicia Marcus, Malia Palakiko, Leonard Patterson, Ann Roach, Roseann Rock, Stephanie Sandor, Robyn Spencer, Milagro Suarez, Vivek Varughese, Catherine Vega, Bradley Wells
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open space CROSSING THE CHANNEL
section—was littered with bits of driftwood and bleached tree limbs, home, with its wide view of Ross Island, Beverly a tire, rocks, scorched remnants of open fires. Scavenging seagulls and I decided to see the place up close. It was no mingled with crows, ducks, geese. I saw a hunk of metal—perhaps longer enough to walk or bike the trails along the an oil drum or muffler. This all looked like any well-used public shore. bank, looking across the water to the island’s cot- A white sign we’d seen from our windows but hadn’t been able to tonwood and ash trees. It wasn’t enough to watch decipher declared the island a sensitive wildlife habitat. osprey nurture their chicks or to scan the treetops for great blue heron Upriver, after passing a heron sunk meditatively into himself atop a and bald eagle nests. We were still outside the view, and needed to stump, we glimpsed the lagoon through cottonwoods. No longer pubbreak down that distance. lic land, from here it seemed quieter, Ross is the main island among a cluscalmer. A small sailboat anchored in tered quartet in the Willamette River a an inlet. I used the rudder pedals to mile south of downtown Portland, Orbring us nearer shore as we rounded egon. Its 404 acres of land, shaped like the island’s southern tip and turned a cartoon teardrop, enclose a 130-acre into Holgate Channel. Here it felt like lagoon. The island is home to more we’d entered an entirely different wathan 50 species of birds; shelters otter, terway. The passage was narrower, beaver, and a few deer; and accommoosprey clamored in their nests, the dates migrating Chinook, Coho, and water was darker, air cooler. steelhead in its shallow habitats. One Then we turned into the lagoon primary attraction for us, when considfor an eagerly awaited peek since we ering whether to move here, was becouldn’t see it from home. Maybe we’d ing able to witness all this. A reputedly even spot the lagoon-side bald eagle thriving refuge right in the urban core. nest we’d heard about. But, we knew, it had a backstory. It was as though we’d been transOwned and mined since the 1920s by ported to the moon or to a postthe Ross Island Sand & Gravel Comapocalyptic landscape of monstrous pany, it is still in the process of stateprocessing machinery, barges mandated cleanup, of refilling deeply crouched in the water, a rim of vast dredged edges, and of restoring tergravel mounds. Here was the heart rain and habitat. Though 45 acres were of the matter, operation central, and given to the city of Portland in 2007 as it was a blasted vista gone silent that Here was the heart of the matter, a gift by Ross Island’s owner, and 6.4 morning. We stopped paddling. Coloperation central, and it acres belong to the port of Portland, ors were too vivid, surfaces menacwas a blasted vista gone silent that the rest remains company-owned. ing in their poised strangeness. We morning. We stopped paddling. Sand and gravel are no longer mined could look away and see the trees, there but are brought from other sites hear a soaring raptor against the eerie in the Northwest for processing even as reclamation takes place. So silence, notice signs of returning forms of life, and hold on to hope Ross Island is still becoming the thing we thought we saw from our for eventual restoration. But we were also where business was still sixth-floor windows. being done. Less of it, yes; processing rather than dredging, with On an early August morning, the first cloudy day in weeks, we machinery moving toward obsolescence. But we would not forget: rented a tandem kayak from a shop in the marina downtown. Then we the Ross Island we imagined remains a work in progress. paddled the mile back south toward our home, resting as we glided Back home, we knew we’d been on deep, deep waters, now just out past, gazing at its dark windows and waving to where we imagined of sight. We no longer felt distant from what we saw. Soon, settled our cat was watching for us. We’d expected the water to be colder, by our windows, we watched a black barge slowly emerge from but it felt like bathwater. Holgate Channel, heading north. It was so large that we thought it The northwestern end of Ross Island’s bank—the city-owned might never stop filling the view. FTER TWO WEEKS IN OUR NEW RIVERFRONT
6 4 onearth W I N T E R 2 0 1 1
ILLUSTRATION BY MICHAEL GLENWOOD
A
BY FLOYD SKLOOT
RAINBOW LIGHT
A Giant Step
Towards A Smaller Footprint FDA-approved for safety, BPA-Free, 100% recycled and 100% recyclable, our Eco•Guard™ packaging will reuse existing materials and reduce our bottle carbon footprint by 92%. Our best-selling multivitamins deliver the nutrient potencies important for long-term health in a base of superfood extracts plus enzymes and probiotics. And our donations help at-risk populations worldwide. Making a difference for the health of people, pets and planet. www.rainbowlight.com
•Guard ™ Eco
Sustainable Packaging
from Rainbow Light® Bottle
Better for you, better for the planet 800.571.4701 Rainbow Light Nutritional Systems Santa Cruz, CA 95060 www.rainbowlight.com ©2011