Plenty Magazine Issue 01 Dec/Jan 2005

SMART LIVING FOR A COMPLEX WORLD

PLENTY CONTENTS

FRONT MATTER 6 . . . . A NEW GENERATION SPEAKS

The right choices will lead us to the land of PLENTY. 8 . . . . FROM THE EDITOR Who we are and what we’re about 13 . . . . NEWS AND NOTES The greenest of graves, endangered DNA boards the ark, shock therapy for coral reefs, an on-line swap meet, and other bulletins from around the globe 16 . . . . HOW WE LIVE Welcome to Carbondale, Colorado, a modern-day Eden By Kate Siber 22 . . . . ON TECHNOLOGY More reasons to give thanks this season: oil from turkey guts By Jim Quinn

26 . . . . IN THE SPIRIT

Lessons from a paradise lost

By Forrest Church 30 . . . . AROUND THE NATION How red and blue could really add up to green By Mark Spellun 32 . . . . BOOKS Two new titles look at urban vermin and the mysteries of the brain 35 . . . . GREEN GEAR Great stuff for work and play

GRAY MATTER 44 . . . . POWDER PROTECTION PLAN

Ten North American ski resorts that combine eco-correct policies, first-rate accommodations, and world-class sport By Kate Siber

PHOTOGRAPH BY FRANCIS MURPHY. LUCIE IS IN A TEE BY COOLNOTCRUEL.

JANUARY 2005

The world’s supply of fossil fuels is a finite resource, and experts vary in their predictions of when it will dry up. Here’s what you can do now to prepare for future shock. By Michael W. Robbins 70 . . . . SOUNDING THE DEPTHS More than a mile beneath the ocean’s surface, a largely unexplored ecosystem has a band of scientists in its thrall. By Katherine Millet 74 . . . . WHAT’S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT? From Adam and Eve to Adam and Steve, marriage never will be a simple or straightforward proposition. By E. J. Graff 78 . . . . HAUTE CUISINE FOR A SUSTAINABLE PLANET The latest wave in gastronomy uses farm-fresh products and growing methods that do minimal harm to the environment By Cristina Merrill 82 . . . . DRESSED TO CHILL This season, just wear a smile and a shrug. By Lynn Yeager 84 . . . . COUTURE AU NATUREL Vintage prints, organic fabrics, and smart design add up to sharp looks.

MATTERS OF FACT AND FANCY 88 . . . . HEALTH

Whether black, formosa, or oolong, tea offers a range of powerful medical benefits. By Madeline Drexler 92 . . . . DESIGN Handsome, high-end furniture from unexpected sources

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Farm-to-fork cuisine

94 . . . . SHELTER:

A cunning merger between nature and high technology leads to plans for a sleek, energy-efficient dream house.

96 . . . . THE BACK PAGE The Christos’ Gates make a sweeping but ephemeral statement in Frederick Law Olmstead’s most magnificent preserve.

ON THE COVER: Abigail from Ford Models, New York, wears a white latex halter top with bow detail and a black latex pencil skirt with removable flounces by Gaelyn & Gianfriani. Makeup (all animal-free-tested) by Robert Moulton at Ennis for Bare Essentials. Hair by Gavin Anesbury at Stockland Martel. Styling by Ise White at Code Management.

Photograph by Francis Murphy

WARNER HANSON TELEVISION/CHEFS A' FIELD

60 . . . . THE END OF OIL

A N E W G E N E R AT I O N S P E A K S

PLENTY

“Never doubt that a small group of committed people can change the world. Indeed it is the only thing that ever has.”

SUZANNE DURANCEAU

— MARGARET MEAD At the end of World War II and continuing through the 1950s, the American dream became a reality for millions as the economy grew quickly and, for the most part, surely.

The nation cast aside the Great Depression, fielded a massive military force to win the war, and then, in the postwar years, built roads, cars, and homes, and produced a vast quantity of consumer goods. The United States was richly endowed, and its good land and waters supported the enormous growth. Few voices called attention to the negative effects of this mostly unregulated use of the country’s resources.

Then, in the 1960s, as we entered a period of self-examination and rebellion, manifested most vocally by the nation’s youth, significant numbers of Americans began to take notice of the misuse of our environment. One of the most important benchmarks of the era was the publication in 1962 of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which awakened us to the environmental degradation in our own backyard. And with the onset of the oil crisis of 1973, we were forced for the first time on a global scale to examine seriously the limitations of the world’s natural resources. The earth was no longer an object that could be endlessly exploited—there were patently limits to how much we could extract from our oceans and forests, how much we could expel into the air we breathe, without doing irreparable harm.

While America’s concern for the planet has fluctuated over the decades, we have generally viewed the environment as an area warranting public as well as private concern. Clearly, some of the major ecological problems of our day, such as global warming, have to be dealt with on an international scale and require government intervention. But there are now a growing number of ways for each of us to minimize the impact we have on our fragile surroundings, at the same time improving the quality of our lives, independent of any governmental action.

Every generation must decide what is good and valuable. In the 1950s, in an era of cheap and seemingly limitless oil, consumers were drawn to hulking cars with flashy tail fins. Today green options abound, and these not only are pleasing to the eye but also require no sacrifice of comfort or design. You simply have to hunt a little harder to find them (and in time these options should be even more readily available). There are hybrid cars that get unprecedented gas mileage, but still have most of the power we’ve come to enjoy and expect. Tasty organic foods, designer clothes, and elegant furniture made from sustainably harvested natural resources are available at competitive prices. There are even ways to build a beautiful house from ecologically friendly materials.

Partly because of unprecedented consumer demand, but also because of the inherent logic, businesses are rethinking their core processes. They are not simply trying to market themselves as green, but more and more forward-looking companies are becoming green by reinventing how they make things and by closely examining the resources they use.

All of these changes bode well for the future, but it’s still all too evident that the world’s key natural resources are being depleted at an alarming rate, and even its climate has begun to change. We need to look to alternatives if humanity is to thrive and prosper. We have, for instance, an inexhaustible supply of solar and wind energy, and hydrogen fuel cells stand out as promising replacements for our oil-based economy. If we, as individuals and as a society, make the right choices, we can still have a world of PLENTY. —Mark Spellun, Publisher & Editor in Chief www.plentymag.com January 2005

PLENTY | 7

FROM THE EDITOR

“W

ho are you?” we wondered as we plotted out the contents of the magazine you hold in your hands.

Who is the ideal Plenty reader, how can we provide stories and ideas that will satisfy and excite you, and how can we bring you back to us issue after issue? We hope that you are from all over the country but a lot like us, the creative team assembled to bring you this new venture.

That is, you’re intellectually curious and in touch with the topics of our times—but most especially those that touch on the future of the planet; you like to live well but probably not ostentatiously; you wonder how you can do things better to make the kind of incremental changes that add up to powerful transformation; and you have an eye on a brighter and more inspiring future, even if the news sometimes seems to spell out doom and gloom.

And so we put together a magazine for aware and self-aware people who are concerned about major environmental and social issues.

You’ve been hearing a lot about gay marriage, for example, but have you ever thought that it is no more unnatural an alliance than the conjugal bonds sanctioned by different societies down through history? As E. J. Graff explains in “What’s Love Got to Do with It?” marriage has always been an institution tempered by religion and the state, and nontraditional wedlock is more the norm than you might expect. Rising gas prices over the summer had us all concerned, so in “The End of Oil?” veteran reporter Michael W. Robbins takes a long hard look at the future of oil and makes recommendations on preparing for the coming crisis now. On a more upbeat note, senior editor Cristina Merrill surveys a flavorful new culinary movement sweeping the country, one that brings you haute cuisine from sound organic practices. And science writer Katherine Millett takes you to the bottom of the sea, where recently discovered ecosystems thrive in strange and seldom-explored corners of the deep.

But you needn’t go to such extremes to find a community living in harmony with its surroundings: Staff writer Kate Siber discovered a latter-day Eden in Carbondale, Colorado, where the indendentminded citizens have established a “sustainable” way of life and the town motto is “Get off your ass and do something.” Taking a cue from her own reporting, Siber also carried out an exhaustive assignment to uncover the top ten ski resorts that combine eco-conscious policies with challenging downhill sport, finding in the process some impressive accommodations and first-rate restaurants.

When it comes to style, we’ve discovered that the rather stodgy term “environmentally correct” can also mean hip, elegant, and up-to-the-minute. Take a look, for example, at the fashions we’ve assembled from cutting-edge designers like coolnotcruel, the home furnishings from an up-and-coming “bionutrient” entrepreneur, and the plans for a fantasy eco-house from a team of top-flight architects.

So we hope there is much to keep you engaged in this first issue of Plenty. And if you follow health expert Madeline Drexler’s advice in “Therapeutic Tea,” you may want to savor all that we have to offer with a cup of that bracing brew—you’ll be enhancing your health even as the rest of the magazine enlightens and entertains.

Ann Landi Editor

8 | PLENTY

January 2005 www.plentymag.com

PLENTY Publisher & Editor in Chief Mark Spellun Editor Ann Landi Senior Editors Madeline Drexler, E. J. Graff, Shana Liebman, Christina Merrill Science Editor Michael W. Robbins Technology Editor Jim Quinn Staff Writer Kate Siber Associate Editor Sandra Ban Contributing Editors Forest Church, Lindsay Goldwert, Katherine Millet, Lynn Yaeger

Creative Director Catherine Cole Staff Photographer Francis Murphy

Chief Operating Officer Val Landi

PLENTY Advertising, U.S. Sales Offices Eastern United States: 250 West 57th Street, Suite 1915, New York, NY 10107 Deborah Gardiner, Sales Director (Tel: 1-212-757-3794) Robert Rosenbaum, Regional Director (Tel: 1-914-686-0442) Midwest and Detroit: 31555 West Fourteen Mile Road, Suite 313, Farmington Hills, MI 48334 Susan L. Carey, Regional Director; Sue Maniloff, Regional Director (Tel: 1-248-539-3055) Western United States: 6 Commonwealth Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94118 Suzanne Coppola, Sales Director (Tel: 1-415-751-7201) Published by Environ Press, Inc. Chairman Arnold Spellun

PLENTY 250 West 57th Street, Suite 1915 New York, NY 10107 Tel: 1-212-757-3447 Fax: 1-212-757-3799 www.plentymag.com Unsolicited manuscripts, photographs, and other materials must be accompanied by a self-addressed, stamped envelope. PLENTY will not be responsible for unsolicited submissions Send letters to the editor to letters@plentymag.com or to PLENTY, 250 West 57th Street, Suite 1915, New York, NY 10107. Copyright Š2004 by Environ Press, Inc. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or part without written permission is prohibited. Views expressed herein are those of the author exclusively.

PLENTY is published bimonthly, six times a year, for $23.70 per year by Environ Press, Inc., 250 West 57th Street, Suite 1915, New York, NY 10107. Application to mail periodicals postage rates is pending at New York, New York, and additional mailing offices.

POSTMASTER: Send address changes to Plenty Magazine, P.O. Box 437, Mt. Morris, IL 61054-0437 or call 1-800-316-9006.

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PLENTY

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&

NEWS NOTES JURASSIC ARK

A

aimed at preserving the DNA of endangered species is underway at three British institutions, including the Natural History Museum and the Institute of Zoology in London.

Dubbed the “Frozen Ark,” the project hopes to collect frozen DNA and tissue samples from thousands of species believed in danger of extinction within the next 30 years. The genetic codes, stored in a frozen database, act as a back-up copy before the animals are lost for good. Some British scientists speculate that the genetic material might one day be used for cloning, but more urgent is the preservation of DNA from animals at risk of dying out in the next five years. Thus some of the first samples in the ark have been taken from the Chinese yellow sea horse, Polynesian tree snails, the scimitar-horned oryx in North Africa, and the British field cricket. “I think Noah would be proud of this project,” said Sir Crispin Tickell, director of the Green College Centre for Environmental Policy and Understanding at Oxford University, adding that “the damp and slimy are just as important—if not more important—than the warm and the furry.”

N AMBITIOUS PROJECT

FREE AT LAST ILLUSTRATION,BY CHRISTINA SUN; PHOTOGRAPH BY MITZI-JILL RAPKIN

S

OME THINGS IN LIFE ARE FREE—or

at least they are at Freecycle.org. The one-yearold service, which began in Tucson, Arizona, and has since spread to more than 1,300 cities worldwide, operates on the simple but ingenious premise that for every person who has something to give away, there is another person who will gladly come and get it.

Rather than setting your old bed of nails on the curb, for instance, you can send an email to the group headed “Offer: bed of nails.”

Within minutes someone will claim it. (True story.) Instead of buying a new digicam, you can post: “Wanted: Digital Camera” and hope for the best. Founder Deron Beal estimates that freecyclers keep six tons of trash out of landfills each day, but getting these folks to understand that it’s just as good to

www.plentymag.com January 2005

give as to get can be tough. “Everyone joins because they want to get something for free,” says Beal, who came up with the idea while recycling furniture for Tucson businesses.

“Ultimately it’s about local giving in communities.” Acts of kindness in Beal’s community include a couple who asked for, and received, new furniture after theirs burned in a fire; a woman who started a toy drive in anticipation of the holidays; and a boy who began a rescue shelter—for guinea pigs.

Beal, on the other hand, who relies on Yahoo! groups to power Freecycle, has yet to find a pro bono web designer to create an independent site for the network. “I’ve tried asking three times,” he says. “It’s just impossible to get it done for free.”

—Nicole Davis

GREENER PASTURES?

I

SOUTH CAROLINA’S BLUE RIDGE MOUNTAINS, Ramsey Creek Preserve chirps with life. As the morning N THE FOOTHILLS OF

sun rises over the meadow, creatures wake on these bucolic 32 acres. It is home to nesting hawks, deer, fish, two species of threatened plant life, and even an itinerant bear. It is also the final resting place for those who want an alternative to contemporary burial.

As opposed to a lifestyle choice, being buried here is a death-style choice.

Dr. Billy Campbell of Westminster, South Carolina, created Ramsey Creek, the nation’s first green cemetery and nature preserve rolled into one. He’s helped create another in northern California and is now looking at land in Colorado in an effort to help people literally go green.

Ramsey Creek prohibits embalming fluids and caskets treated with chemicals; lawns sprayed with herbicides and traditional headstones are also taboo. Instead, the bodies are buried in nontoxic biodegradable wood or cardboard coffins or cotton shrouds—or planted directly into the ground. Headstones placed flat on the burial site must be made from indigenous rocks. Cremated remains are also scattered or buried in the preserve, which is kept wild except for ecological-restoration projects and a series of hiking trails.

“If you are worried about going to paradise,” says Campbell, “here it is.”

— Mitzi-Jill Rapkin P L E N T Y | 13

&

NEWS NOTES A

PLASTIC THAT DISSOLVES IN WATER won the 2004 Australian Museum Eureka Prize for Industry. Developed by Plantic Technologies Ltd. (www.plantic.com.au), the “plastic” is made from the corn starch in maize and is suitable for packaging items like cookies and candy, as well as electronic components. When exposed to the elements—or even composted with other organic materials—it breaks down into water and carbon dioxide. Along with a cash prize of 10,000 Australian dollars (US $7,150), the company will have a newly discovered species of long-legged fly, the Krakatauia planticorum, named in its honor.

REEFER MADNESS

R

EGULAR JOLTS of low-voltage electricity are reviving a badly damaged coral reef off the fishing village of Pemuteran near Bali in Indonesia, restoring the vibrant colors that are so attractive to fish and other sea life, not to mention tourists and scuba divers.

Cables embedded in the fine black sand carry the current, which is generated from an onshore charging station, to dozens of grids made from welded construction bars. Small fragments of live coral embedded in the grids begin to grow five to ten times faster than normal, with brighter colors and greater resistance to the weather and pollution.

Indonesia is home to about three-quarters of the 793 known coral-reef-building species, which have suffered from destructive fishing practices and the effects of El Niño. (The unusual weather pattern caused widespread bleaching of the reefs in the 1990s.) The newly vibrant colors of the coral

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regrowth have attracted squid, sea urchins, starfish, and large groups of young fish; deep-water fish also come into the reef to rest during the daytime; and divers are returning in droves. The amount of electricity needed to shock the reefs to life again?

Per week, it’s about the equivalent of burning a single 60-watt bulb for a month.

ROAD RUNNER

PROZAC NATION

T

HE COUNTRY that has always prided itself on keeping a stiff upper lip may be mellowing out in unexpected ways. Late this summer reports from the United Kingdom revealed that traces of the antidepressant drug Prozac have been building up in rivers and groundwater. The popular drug, technically known as fluoxetine and used to treat disorders ranging from bulimia to depression, finds its way into the water system via treated sewage water in sufficient quantities to sound alarms within the British Environment Agency, prompting one spokesman to call the phenomenon a “hidden mass medication upon the unsuspecting public.” Of course, this still pales in comparison to the very public mass medication that goes on in pubs after 5 p.m., and even the nation’s official water watchdog, the Drinking Water Inspectorate, pooh-poohs concerns, saying the drugs are “excreted in very low concentrations” and are too “watered down” to cause any real harm.

A

SOLAR-POWERED CAR that looks like a sleek oversized skateboard went on tour in Scandinavia late last summer to promote the virtues of sustainable technologies. Built by a team of Dutch students in less than nine months, Nuna II was the winner of the World Solar Challenge in 2003, attaining a top speed of 105 mph. The three-wheeled car is 16 feet long and three wide, and just large enough for one driver, who lies inside the vehicle head-up and looking through a small Plexiglas bubble. Instead of a steering wheel, two rods allow the driver to turn the vehicle’s wheels. On its 1550-mile tour of Norway and Sweden, Nuna II averaged about 40 to 55 mph and made frequent stops to allow people to get a better look. “It’s a bit of an odd bird on the road,” said John Marcopoulos, one of the organizers of the tour. And an even rarer species in the showroom: The custom-built car’s price tag is a whopping $500,000.

PLENTY TIP OF THE MONTH Light bulbs are popping up over the heads of good greenies as they realize that a deregulated energy market—which California still blames for its expensive power meltdown—may actually help save the planet. Already more than 360,000 residential customers are getting their electricity from renewable resources. All it takes is a phone call.

Sanctioned in more states in the past two years than in the previous ten combined, competitive energy markets not only help lower bills but also allow Americans to choose their preferred power source. This means that environmentally correct consumers can now easily switch to green power: electricity generated with renewable resources like sun, wind, water and geothermal heat.

Green power is now available to retail or wholesale customers in 18 states. Information for each state can be accessed at www.eere.energy.gov/greenpower. But even if your state is not implementing electricity market competition, you may still be able to purchase green power through your regulated utility. More than 500 regulated utilities in 30-some states offer “green pricing” programs which allow customers to support a greater level of utility investment in renewable energy by paying a premium on their electric bill to cover any above-market costs of acquiring renewable-energy resources.

—Shana Liebman January 2005 www.plentymag.com

PHOTOGRAPHS LEFT,

NOW YOU SEE IT...

HOW WE LIVE

OUR TOWN t seems every small American town has some distinguishing feature—a famous resident, an obscure historical mention, the world’s largest ball of twine—but Carbondale, Colorado, has more than its fair share of character. This is a place where voters established the dandelion as the town flower to symbolize the citizenry’s friendliness toward all things green.

Main Street is lined with old miners’ shacks that house, among other establishments, an organic-foods restaurant, an independent bookstore, and a store for sustainable building materials. The neighborhood architecture is eco-eclectic—straw-bale houses on the same street as Victorians outfitted with solar panels—and the residents walk, bike, or drive their biodiesel-run Jettas to work.

Every Wednesday, hundreds of locals descend on the farmers’ market to shop for

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organic seven-grain bread and arugula. A motto engraved on the bench outside town hall sums up the Carbondale philosophy: “Get off your ass and do something!”

An Eden for the modern tree hugger?

Pretty close. Carbondale, a 30-minute drive from the world-class ski resort of Aspen, in central Colorado, has been a magnet for the independent-minded ever since its incorporation in 1888. Gold prospectors, cattle ranchers, potato farmers, and coal miners settled in Carbondale during the great westward expansion of the 19th and early 20th centuries. The 1970s and ’80s brought an influx of hippies, and now, as the population quickly approaches 6,000, the burg is finally coming into its own as a haven for mountain folks with environmental mojo.

It’s easy to see how Carbondale works its magic: Sitting on the toes of snow-capped,

12,953-foot Mount Sopris, it marks the confluence of the Crystal and Roaring Fork Rivers and is a paradise of lush green pastures, towering red-rock cliffs, and mountain vistas that rival the Rockies’ most spectacular panoramas. The first environmentalists to be seduced by Carbondale were Vermonters John and Anne Holden, who founded the Colorado Rocky Mountain School in 1953 for the sons and daughters of rich Easterners as “an antidote to modern easy living.”

Students still study a high-calibre, collegepreparatory curriculum but also spend at least 20 days a year in the wilderness. On the campus itself, they maintain an organic farm, process biodiesel for the campus truck, and recycle eight tons of their food scraps into compost each year.

Momentum picked up in the Roaring Fork Valley in 1994 when a group of conJanuary 2005 www.plentymag.com

DAVID CLIFFORD

Welcome to Carbondale, Colorado, a place with major eco-mojo KATE SIBER

HOW WE LIVE programs like “What’s Growin’ On?” a monthly organic gardening show.

“Carbondale was more of a hippie enclave, and now it’s changing,” says Brook Le Van, executive director of the local nonprofit Sustainable Settings. “It’s not just the affluence, it’s the sophistication. There’s still the drumming group that meets in the park on Saturdays, but diversity has improved.”

What originally drew much of Carbondale’s new crowd is an educational nonprofit called Solar Energy International.

Housed in a ramshackle brick building downtown, it’s swamped with solar-voltaic panels and has an army of solar cookers in the front yard for weekly potluck dinners. Despite appearances, since 1991, it has single-handedly attracted 1,000 students a year from all over the country and the world to choose from a lengthy menu of hands-on classes, such as how to build straw-bale houses (made from tightly packed straw and earthen plaster), brew biodiesel, and race solar cars. Most students stay between a week and six months, but some can’t manage to leave, like Scott Ely, who founded Sunsense, a solar-power equipment distribution center, and Earthsense, a renewable-energy educational-tool manufacturer, on the outskirts of town.

On the flip side, like the rest of Colorado, which is the third fastest-growing state after Nevada and Arizona and has swelled at twice the national rate for the last ten years,

The whole Roaring Fork Valley—about 60,000 residents—is now crammed with nearly 400 nonprofit organizations, and Carbondale is the center, geographically and socially, for people seeking the enviro buzz.

Carbondale has seen an alarming—and perhaps destructive—population boom. In 1990, just over 3,000 citizens lived here; by 2002, the population of this tiny mountain town had almost doubled. It’s not just the green folks who are moving to this mountain town; there are also strong contingents of Latino immigrants and even some newly minted millionaires, forced from Aspen by the billionaires to buy their second homes in Carbondale and nearby Basalt.

“When we first came here in 1941, there were probably about 430 people in Carbondale, and the whole economy was based on hay and cattle and potatoes,” says Bob Perry, owner of Mt. Sopris Hereford Ranch in Carbondale. “Today we’re a community that’s totally different. There are lots of people around here who run corporations all over the country from their homes.” It’s these people who have forced the prices to soar. In just the last eight years, the average cost of a new single-family house has gone from about $150,000 to more than $350,000.

“All the prices are going up,” says Cameron Burns, an editor at the Rocky Mountain Institute and a 14-year resident of

FEEL THE BEAT Outdoor musicians are a regular Saturday feature in Carbondale’s town park.

18 | P L E N T Y

January 2005 www.plentymag.com

DAVID CLIFFORD

cerned citizens founded the Community Office for Resource Efficiency (CORE), run out of Aspen and Carbondale. The nonprofit group has helped institute the stiffest carbondioxide pollution tax in the world, charging the Aspen residents who’d rather not part with their heated driveways and outdoor pools as much as $100,000 per household for excess energy use. Through CORE, the town recycles the tax revenues (in three years, more than $2.5 million) to invest in valleywide programs like no-interest loans on solar panels, rebates for citizens using energy-efficient appliances, and energy-education classes for local schools.

The whole Roaring Fork Valley—about 60,000 residents—is now crammed with nearly 400 nonprofit organizations, and Carbondale is the center, geographically and socially, for people seeking the enviro buzz.

Among the colorful environmental organizations and businesses that have taken root are a biodiesel cooperative (through which about 25 members process their own fuel from local restaurants’ discarded grease); an organic-gardening cooperative; and a macrobiotic education center. There’s even Caca LoCo, a store that sells small muslin sacks of boutique compost with names like “Buddhapoo” and “Bureaucrap.” The most popular local radio station in the valley, KDNK, is located on one end of Main Street and airs music from reggae to heavy metal to

HOW WE LIVE MAIN STREET, USA Once lined with miners’ shacks, downtown is now home to eco-friendly emporiums.

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It may be ambitious to create a model community of Carbondale, with its population boom and soaring prices, but the wealth that’s moving into the town is making it possible for many nonprofit and community projects to survive. design to ethical animal husbandry.

And there are still other big ideas in the works. Scott Chaplin, director of a Carbondale social-justice nonprofit called the Stepstone Center, is securing land for a green office park, to be known as the Center for Sustainable Technology. By 2005, Solar Energy International and other nonprofits and businesses plan to move their headquarters to the new green-designed building to pool resources and attract more businesses to the area. In 2002, a Carbondale nurse founded the nonprofit Davi Nikent, dedicated to establishing a holistic healing center in Carbondale by 2005. A local acupuncturist is raising funds to build an unconventional retirement community with an organic farm, alternative therapies, and a combination of herbal and Western medicines.

“You know, if we can let people know that there’s a place out there where people can make things happen, maybe that’ll give them hope that they can make things happen in their own communities too,” says Chaplin. It may be ambitious to create a model community of Carbondale, with its population boom and soaring prices, but, on the upside, the wealth that’s moving into the town is making it possible for many nonprofit and community projects to survive.

“We’d all like to see the sustainable thing become mainstream,” says Ely. “It might seem far off, but what better place to start than Carbondale?” ■ Kate Siber, staff writer for Plenty, writes frequently about travel for Outside and other publications.

January 2005 www.plentymag.com

DAVID CLIFFORD

the valley. “The population boom is creating this massive up-and-down swing of traffic on the highway, and it’s bringing in all the ills of the urban world.” Large multimillion-dollar developments have sprouted throughout the area, and the valley has yet to provide a highly effective public transit system to accommodate new arrivals. (Until properly funded, Carbondale’s electric buses are destined for hibernation.) But the ills of population growth and suburban- and urbanization are plaguing countless Colorado mountain towns. Here, however, there is still a remarkable sense that affordable, sustainable development and positive change are possible.

“This is no Shangri-la tucked away in the mountains,” says mayor and local architect Michael Hassig. “But I think what sets this town apart is that it’s a place where an individual can make a change and really get involved. There’s always a new nonprofit or a new committee or a new group with an idea.

People are not apathetic here.” Case in point: In 2002, after the town government approved the construction of a 250,000-square-foot mall on 25 acres of pasture land on Carbondale’s west side, residents petitioned to hold a referendum on the mall proposal and subsequently shot it down, sending the California developers packing.

Citizens in this town have big ideas, and, amazingly, many of them work: One development company that is building 48 houses on the east end of town has put 20 acres of its 82-acre property into a conservation easement. Nine of its houses will be deed restricted and affordable, and two of those will be passive-solar designed and decked with the latest energy-efficient technology.

On the other side of town, Sustainable Settings, a seven-year-old nonprofit, has already raised more than $2.5 million toward building a learning center on its historic 244acre farm. Schoolchildren already visit the farm to study the wetlands and play with the barnyard animals, but when completed, farm managers, interns, and scholars will live on the premises in a retrofitted 1893 farmhouse and brand new, super-efficient buildings.

They’ll use energy from a 110-foot windmill, enjoy the ritziest compost toilets on the market, and study everything from permaculture

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ON TECHNOLOGY

GOBBLE TO GAS From the “spare parts” of a turkey comes a high-quality, inexpensive fuel JIM QUINN

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substances as manure and the offal from slaughterhouse waste.

“I became intimately familiar with carbon transfer,” he says, describing the chemical processes nature uses to convert one type of organic material into another. An example is the way long-dead plants and animals turn into oil when subjected to heat and pressure.

The transformation is actually a simple process that’s easily duplicated by putting biomass in a pressure cooker. It isn’t done commercially because heating the glop costs more than the value of the oil produced.

At least, that was the problem until Baskis invented a solution. “It came to me in a textbook ‘Eureka!’ moment,’’ he says. ‘It was a vision. I got the idea, built a model, and ran it to prove that it works.’’

For more details, check out U.S. Patent 5,269,947, granted to Baskis in 1993. Or go to Carthage, Missouri, the site of the first industrial-scale implementation of Thermal Conversion.

Carthage is the home of a huge Butterball Turkey plant owned by ConAgra Foods. It’s

not something you want to think about during Thanksgiving dinner, but the 10-pound turkey you buy at the grocery started out as a 20-pound bird, before workers removed the feathers, feet, head, blood, and guts. The 800 workers at the Butterball plant process 30,000 turkeys a day, generating a mountain of garbage. Disposing of it safely is a difficult, expensive problem. Federal, state, and local officials have repeatedly cited ConAgra for illegally polluting groundwater, dumping in a nearby river, and overwhelming a local sewage-treatment plant.

Hence the construction of a $31 million thermal-conversion plant designed by Changing World Technologies, the company formed to investigate and commercialize waste-conversion technologies. The funding sources include ConAgra, a $5 million EPA grant, and a prestigious list of private investors, notably former CIA director R. James Woolsey.

Completed early this year, the plant puts turkey waste into giant pressure cookers.

The glop is superheated, then rapidly depresJanuary 2005 www.plentymag.com

ILLUSTRATION BY HAL MAYFORTH

T

he search for new supplies for oil extends from the sands of Iraq to the frozen plains of Alaska. Oil companies search high, low, and lower for those increasingly elusive sources of the most valuable energy on earth.

They should have looked in their Thanksgiving leftovers.

A startling new technology with the potential to resolve some of our most pressing environmental and economic problems is being pushed by some of the sharpest investors in the world. Backers claim it can produce vast amounts of clean, affordable oil, and the first large-scale production plants prove it works exactly as its most ardent fans claim.

But what’s most astonishing is that this process produces oil from waste—from discarded tires to plain old sewage. In fact, the first plants are fueled with guts. Turkey guts, to be exact.

Meet Paul Baskis, a modern-day alchemist who turns offal into oil. “The hard part was not coming up with the invention,” says Baskis, 53, of Chicago. “The hard part was putting the business together, and convincing people that it really works.”

“It” is thermal conversion, Baskis’s process that coaxes the molecules in waste to rearrange themselves into high-quality synthetic oil. A demonstration plant and a fullsize production plant are currently in operation, and several more are under development in the United States and Europe.

The story began in 1984, when Baskis started to work toward his master’s degree in microbiology at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He studied composting, the natural process using beneficial micro-organisms to convert organic waste into soilenriching mulch. Baskis’s research taught him about the chemical composition of such

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ON TECHNOLOGY

This is different from natural petroleum, which takes carbon from deep in the earth and adds it to the environment. “Because it isn’t a fossil fuel, it doesn’t add to global warming,” Baskis says. surized to release steam and stop the process exactly when the oil is ready. Baskis’s key innovation involves capturing the heat in that steam and using it to warm the next batch.

“That’s what makes it possible financially,” Baskis says.

For each 100 pounds of turkey waste, the plant produces 50 pounds of distilled water, 39 pounds of oil, 6 pounds of natural gas, and 5 pounds of minerals that can be used as fertilizer. And nothing—not even a wishbone—is left over.

“We produce oil better than anything you pump out of the ground,” says Baskis. The blend at Carthage is 70 percent diesel fuel and 30 percent gasoline. But unlike natural petroleum, this synthetic fuel contains no toxic impurities like sulphur, mercury, or lead. The plant operators sell the oil and minerals, use the natural gas to fuel the plant, and dump the water in the sewer.

Officials with Changing World Technologies say the plant is currently earning a small profit. Baskis estimates that improvements will eventually make it practical to produce a barrel of oil for less than $15. (As this story was written, the cost of crude oil just topped $50 a barrel.)

A key advantage to thermal conversion is that it doesn’t contribute to the greenhouse effect. Like natural oil, the synthetic oil releases carbon dioxide when it burns.

Carbon dioxide is the main culprit blamed for global warming, but the synthetic oil takes its carbon from the environment. This is different from natural petroleum, which takes carbon from deep in the earth and adds it to the environment. “Because it isn’t a fossil fuel, it doesn’t add to global warming,” Baskis says.

At this point you should be asking, Isn’t there a catch? There are several. None appears to be serious. The biggest problem at Carthage stemmed from building the first industrial-scale machines needed to duplicate what Baskis achieved in his lab.

Most of the details were resolved when Changing World Technologies built a small, seven-ton-per-day plant in Philadelphia to demonstrate thermal conversion to skeptical investors. Serious construction mistakes hampered the first months of production at the much-larger Carthage facility, but extensive repairs eventually allowed the company to reach full capacity, accepting 200 tons of waste per day and producing 500 barrels of oil.

Although the first plants were designed to handle slaughterhouse waste, Changing World Technologies is now embracing Baskis’s dream of processing any kind of garbage. The company is designing plants that will handle sewage, mixed plastics, and rubber from discarded tires. Long term, the company’s executives say thermal conversion could make most organic waste too valuable to send to landfills.

The technology got an unexpected boost in December, when a case of bovine spongiform encephalopathy—mad cow disease— triggered a crisis in the U.S. beef industry.

For generations, cattle processors have disposed of slaughterhouse waste by converting some of it to cattle feed. This practice is blamed for the spread of the disease. The crisis prompted calls for safer ways to get rid of the waste, a problem complicated by the fact that proteins believed to cause mad cow aren’t destroyed by conventional disposal methods.

Thermal conversion destroys every type of infectious agent, including the cause of mad cow. Baskis says that plants planned for Alabama and Colorado are being designed to provide a safe way to dispose of the carcasses of diseased cattle, as well as conventional slaughterhouse waste. Leftovers, anyone? ■ Jim Quinn is technology editor of Plenty and the author of the forthcoming book Inventions That Changed the World (Barnes & Noble, September 2005).

January 2005 www.plentymag.com

THE HARTS, FAMILY OF FIVE Enjoyed pure, natural taste Boosted calcium absorption Did something good for the environment Had enough yogurt for tonight’s dinner recipe, three kids snacks and one begging dog

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IN THE SPIRIT THE MYSTERIOUS MOAI These giant stone heads were the culprits in Easter Island’s eventual demise.

R

LESSONS FROM A PARADISE LOST Whether to be the stewards or the lords of all that we survey FORREST CHURCH 26 | P L E N T Y

eligion pays homage to the Creator. Ecology respects the Creation. It’s hard to think of two more “natural” partners. Yet beginning with dueling Bible verses in the first two chapters of Genesis, things are not that simple. Faith and the environment jibe only when we “tend the earth and keep it,” not when we seek to establish “dominion” over it.

Consider the Easter Islanders. Some 16 centuries ago, Polynesian explorers arrived on Rapa Nui, an island halfway between Chile and Tahiti. Having sailed at least 1,400 miles—the closest landfall being Pitcairn— these intrepid souls planted a thriving, artistic culture on this island Eden.

Rapa Nui abounded in flora and fauna.

Its subtropical forests contained torimo trees (for firewood), hauhau trees (for making rope), and numberless stands of the Easter Island palm. Growing as high as 80 feet and as thick as 6 feet, this relative of the Chilean wine palm was perfect for canoes, which allowed the settlers to take advantage of the sea’s abundant larder.

At the apex of its vitality, the island hosted 10,000 residents. Yet when discovered anew by Dutch merchants in 1722, Rapa Nui was a wasteland. Apart from a handful of survivors, all that remained were hundreds of gigantic stone heads, or moai. The largest, 32 feet high, weighed 50 tons.

Offering an irresistible magnet for extraterrestrial speculation, the real story here is dramatic enough without recourse to science fiction. The weight of recent scholarly evidence fingers the moai (together with climatic shifts and associated famine) as the major culprits in Rapu Nui’s demise. It now appears that, in addition to providing wood for canoes, the island’s palm trees were felled almost certainly to roll and to prop up, and perhaps to scaffold, these monumental statues during their remarkable “walk” from the mountains to the hundreds of abus (platforms or shrines) that ring the island. The hauhau trees furnished rope to pull the monoliths along and to help erect them. The torimo trees were burned to clear the way.

In the process of honoring God and their ancestors, these devout Polynesians systematically pillaged their environment, until not a tree remained on the entire island.

January 2005 www.plentymag.com

IN THE SPIRIT

A WINDSWEPT WASTELAND Not a trace remains of the rich subtropical forests that nourished a thriving artistic culture.

A once flourishing people had sacrificed themselves on their own altar.

Without its forests, Easter Island quickly became inhospitable to numerous life forms, including our own. Without wood for canoes, the fishing industry was destroyed.

Civil war followed, along with the advent of cannibalism. A once flourishing people had sacrificed themselves on their own altar.

A similar tension exists in Western religion from the very beginning. In the Book of Genesis, competing creation stories underscore the gulf between an environmentally friendly faith and one that places the earth in jeopardy.

Biblical scholars recognize two ancient creation stories woven together in chapters one and two of Genesis. In the so-called E, or Elohist, narrative, God (literally, “the gods,” elohim) creates man and woman in the divine image and invests them with lordship over their domain—specifically, with "dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and 28 | P L E N T Y

over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”

In the J, or Jahwist, narrative, the Lord God (Jahweh) molds Adam from the red clay (adam). Although it gives Eve short shrift by plucking her from Adam’s rib cage, the Jahwist creation story is markedly more reverent toward our earthly home: “And the Lord God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to tend it and to keep it.”

Depending on which set of divine instructions we elect to follow, we become either lords or servants—either masters of the universe or stewards of the Creation.

We know which choice the Easter Islanders made. Whatever the specifics of their Polynesian faith (which likely involved both ancestor worship and a monotheistic belief in Make Make, the Creator God), they abandoned all pretense to stewardship in order to honor their idols. Both ecologically and spiritually, the consequences were tragic. By exercising absolute dominion over their island, they despoiled it completely.

We face the same choice today. As we enter the 21st century, in possession of almost godlike technological powers, each ecological decision we make pits the allure of dominion against the responsibility of stewardship. Practicing the latter, we don’t suspend our powers—we direct them in reverent ways. In spiritual terms, alternative technologies for power, energy conservation, balanced multiple-use policies, and the prudent protection of hitherto untrammeled

public lands represent responsible partnering between creature and Creator. On a personal level as well, even as dominion distances and estranges us from the earth beneath our feet, stewardship nurtures both the ground on which we walk and the ground of our being.

Though the E narrative may get my nod for acknowledging the natural equality of woman and man, with respect to the environment, I have to follow the J. Tending and keeping the garden not only is in our enlightened self-interest, but it also nurtures the soul.

Yet dominion remains tempting. It enticed the Easter Islanders, until they had to stop production of their ever-more massive idols, because there were no trees left to transport them to the altar. It may tempt us as well— perhaps to tap and extract all the earth’s natural resources, until millions of SUVs come to a grinding halt and rust in place.

If extraterrestrials ever do show up, such monuments to our misplaced devotion would surely get their antennae vibrating.

Even as the moai have stood mute for centuries, in stony witness to self-destructive human idolatry, why we would do this to ourselves would constitute, to any other life form, an equally unfathomable mystery. ■ Forrest Church, senior minister of All Souls Unitarian Church in Manhattan and chair of the Council on the Environment of New York City, has written many books, most recently Freedom from Fear: Finding the Courage to Act, Love, and Be (St. Martin’s, 2004).

January 2005 www.plentymag.com

A R O U N D T H E N AT I O N

RETRO VS. METRO Is everything so easily divided?

MARK SPELLUN

ver since the 2000 election, the easiest way to break down the country has been to divvy us up into red and blue. Red states vote Republican and are mostly located in the South and the heartland.

Blue states vote Democratic and are mainly found along the two coasts and in parts of the Midwest.

Hollywood hasn’t missed out on this vision of our national culture. First, there’s Fox’s The Simple Life, which takes two bluestate glamour gals, Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie, and matches them with red-state, salt-of-the-earth types. UPN, not to be outdone, created Amish in the City. In this tenepisode miniseries, the producers threw together five young people raised Amish and six young non-Amish in a southern California home—coed bedrooms and pool included. The sexual and social tensions were guaranteed.

Putting aside the fact that many of the participants in these shows are making fools of themselves, the programs show our fascination with how the “other half ” lives.

According to the cultural Zeitgeist, cities are now populated with metrosexuals (usually heterosexuals who crave the finer things in life), and rural areas are filled with loyal churchgoers who drive pickups

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and would rather splurge on a Big Gulp than on shoes from Gucci.

Not all of this is in the imaginations of cultural commentators and reality TV producers.

In some ways we have never been more divided. Republicans overwhelmingly support George W. Bush’s actions in Iraq. Democrats are almost equally critical of them.

That should not be surprising. People tend to develop their political sensibilities at an early age and then absorb facts that support their preexisting positions. New York Times columnist David Brooks has attributed some of the increasing level of partisanship to the information age, which allows people to access news that fits their political perspective. There is thus little gray; we are either red or blue.

The political color chart also extends to our view of the environment. Nationally, 47 percent of Americans have a negative view of environmental conditions, according to Gallup. Only 27 percent have a positive perspective. There is not much variance among those who live in the East, Midwest, South, or West, or in urban, suburban, or rural areas; nor between young and old. Overall concern for the environment is roughly the same in each of those groups. While environmental concerns have achieved broad public awareness, there is a real divide

between Republicans and Democrats. Only 28 percent of Republicans are concerned as compared to 62 percent of Democrats. That’s not surprising though, as “Republican” and “Democrat” are self-described positions, and people tend to take on the policy views of their political party.

Boiling Point, a new book by Ross Gelbspan, details how the American media has done a terrible job of refereeing the debate surrounding global warming, in part because it has been intimidated by industry lobbyists. Many news sources are also poorly equipped to grapple with facts when our political leaders do not confront a topic head on. If there were a stronger, more honest debate around the country over the environmental issues we face and how we should deal with them, then some of the present differences between red and blue could disappear.

We would still be able to laugh at The Simple Life, but we would also be able to rest easy knowing that we were making the difficult decisions we have to make when it comes to conserving our natural resources and minimizing our impact on the earth.

In the months and years ahead PLENTY will examine the issues that impact our lives, raising questions when needed and offering solutions whenever possible. ■ January 2005 www.plentymag.com

BOOKS

OF RODENTS AND REASON TWO NEW TITLES EXPLORE BACK ALLEYS AND THE MYSTERIES OF THE MIND RATS: OBSERVATIONS ON THE HISTORY AND HABITAT OF THE CITY’S MOST UNWANTED INHABITANTS

BY ROBERT SULLIVAN (BLOOMSBURY, $23.95)

AS A SUBJECT for a book-length study, there would seem to be little to recommend this universally despised and vilified creature, most infamous in human history as the carrier of bubonic plague. But Robert Sullivan has discovered in Rattus norvegicus a prism through which to reflect on a number of things—among them, our uneasy relationships with garbage and ghettos, the history of pest extermination, and long-gone urban oddities such as rat-fighting parlors.

Threaded through this lively and entertaining account are ruminations on Sullivan’s own obsessive interest in rats. The author sees himself as a kind of latter-day Thoreau; his Walden Pond is an obscure alley in downtown Manhattan, where he patiently observed the rat population night after night in “four seasons spent among vermin,” hoping to catalogue behavioral quirks and spot the elusive rat king, the leader of the pack.

At the outset we learn some of the characteristics that make this particular rodent an object of such horrified fascination. Rats can exert a biting pressure of up to 7,000 pounds per square inch. They’re attracted to the faces of babies and children because they smell food residues on skin. Male and female rats have sex up to 20 times day; indeed, the male may copulate with his mate even after she’s dead. They’re especially fond of peanut butter and fast-food chicken. And they are damned near impossible to eradicate. The strictly factual serves as a springboard to examine a cast of characters Sullivan presents in loving detail, in a style reminiscent of legendary New Yorker writers Joseph Mitchell and John McPhee. There is Dave Davis, “America’s rodent control guru,” whose conclusion that the way to get rid of rats was by eliminating garbage went largely unheeded. And Jesse Gray, a tenant organizer in Harlem in the 1960s, who used rats to draw attention to shameful conditions in the slums. (“Bring a rat to court!” Gray exhorted the faithful. They did.) And John DeLury, 32 | P L E N T Y

who single-handedly orchestrated the garbage strike that almost shut down New York City in 1968.

Sullivan’s year among the rats allows for numerous entertaining side trips, including a brief history of the Black Death in the Middle Ages and a visit to an exterminators’ convention in Chicago. The account grows strained toward the end, when the author looks for larger meaning—“some great notion that I felt still eluded me about my rats”—and forces dubious parallels with 9/11. Rats have much to tell us about organization and survival, even about the layers of urban history, but these loathsome varmints inspire enough awe and terror without the — ANN LANDI metaphysics.

AN ALCHEMY OF MIND: THE MARVEL AND MYSTERY OF THE BRAIN

BY DIANE ACKERMAN (LITTLE, BROWN, $25)

ANYONE FAMILIAR with Diane Ackerman’s books will know enough not to expect a conventional dissection of phenomena that

might get a dispassionate and orderly exposition from, say, a workaday journalist or a science writer. So this highly subjective and selective tour of the body’s most sophisticated organ won’t tell you precisely how the brain works; rather, the appeal resides in Ackerman’s charged, poetic tour of our gray matter as she explores neurons and dendrites, IQ and Alzheimer’s, emotions and consciousness. We learn, for example that the juncture “between two neurons…is a small liquid space, as is the air between two whispering lovers, yet so much life happens there.” Or that in “experiments where children are offered scent cues along with a word list, they remember the words better.”

Or that when “danger looms, memory does two things immediately. It quickly records where you are and why, who you are with, what you feel, the full pandemonium of wretched details.” And there are myriad other observations and factoids, arranged in coherent though often short chapters, covering evolution, the development of language, the physical brain, and related topics.

But the most compelling parts of this cerebral travelogue are those that draw on the author’s personal experiences and memories. Even years after a failed attempt to save a drowning man’s life in the South Pacific, for instance, Ackerman found herself growing anxious every time she heard a certain Vaughan Williams composition—the music that was seeping from the ship’s radio at the time—and nearly unable to complete a Red Cross CPR class because of the flashbacks to the man’s gruesome death. Her own near demise from a climbing accident on a remote Japanese island, where she had gone in pursuit of the last surviving short-tailed albatross, makes for a gripping account worthy of a screenplay. (She was saved by an “angel,” a young Japanese woman whose long-sleeved white blouse was packed with ice to bring down the author’s fever.)

The joys of An Alchemy of Mind lie in accompanying Ackerman as she pokes in her own inimitable way—drawing on a staggering backlog of reading and research—into the recesses of the supposed seat of reason.

The trip is an often unpredictable and occasionally frustrating one, but well worth it for the brilliant insights and lively detours.— A. L. January 2005 www.plentymag.com

Look Good, Get Lucky!

It probably got your grandfather lucky. Your father may even have gotten lucky too. Since 1935, Lucky Tiger has been an essential part of the neighborhood barber’s hair cut and shave experience. New, Lucky Tiger Organics contain anti-oxidants, essential oils and certified organic botanicals designed to nourish, protect and revitalize the hair and skin. Introduce classic goodness to your Luckiest of customers with Lucky Tiger Organics.

Lucky Tiger Brand • Valhalla, NY 10595 p: 1-800-527-8123 • www.getluckytiger.com Lucky Tiger donates to charities dedicated to preserve and protect endangered tigers No Animal Testing, Animal Products never a consideration, 100% Recyclable packaging.

GREEN GEAR

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Conserving energy or saving the planet doesn’t have to mean any sacrifice in comfort, style, or good design.

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5-IN-1 EMERGENCY Radio & Spotlight, $39.95 (sharperimage.com) It’s a radio. It’s a clock. It’s a flashlight.

During the day, you can point this gizmo at the sun to recharge.

At night (or in a blackout), turn the crank to turn on the juice.

BROOKSTONE

Mini CCFL Desk Light, $25 (brookstone.com) This little lamp saves energy and desk space. You can connect it to your computer’s USB port (or wall outlet) for a bright light that burns 75 percent less energy than similar fluorescent lamps.

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SOLARSCOTTe VEST $475 (scottevest.com) A suave, streamlined, sun-run jacket containing patent-pending technology that lets you carry and use all your wireless gadgets.

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By John Fluevog, $149 (fluevog.com) The slip-on style has a split-seam design; elastic panels and pull tabs make for smooth entry and soft landings. The “Angelic” sole, made from the latex of the Hevea tree, offers comfort and flexibility, and should you decide to toss these shoes anytime soon, this part is guaranteed biodegradable.

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MESSENGER BAG Made from recycled rubber, $99 (vulcanabags.com) A 16- by 13-inch carry-all made from patented, recycled, car-tire sheet rubber that will probably last longer than you. (Mention PLENTY magazine in the comment section of the online ordering page and get a 25 percent discount from any orders on the site.)

January 2005 www.plentymag.com

GREEN GEAR

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WALK THE TALK Recycled Tote, $50 (uncommongoods.com) Glam photos from fashion shoots get recycled into a stylish patchwork, then coated in plastic for weather-proof durability.

P L AY F OR KE EPS

8y 38 | P L E N T Y

BIKE CHAIN Bottle Opener, $10 (uncommongoods.com) A bicycle chain and cog piece meet up to lift the lid.

9y

FOOTPRINTS $160 (Birkenstock.com) The same dependable comfort as their venerable forebears, with a cork sole that makes these instant classics environmentally sound.

January 2005 www.plentymag.com

Sierra Club Online Web Store

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ORGANIC TOWELS

By Gaiam, $14-$64 (gaiam.com) Luxurious bath towels in a variety of patterns and colors, and all made from 100 percent organic cotton with lowimpact, eco-correct dyes.

10y FIRE & LIGHT

Recycled glassware, $15-$200 (fireandlight.com) Made with different amounts of recycled glass depending on the color, these translucent gems will lighten up any meal.

E V E RY

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Rub-Away Bar, $7.50 (crateandbarrel.com) Through a simple chemical reaction, this stainless steel bar designed like a cake of soap “washes� away the odors from garlic, fish, and other foods.

40 | P L E N T Y

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CRATE & BARREL

D AY F LAIR THE PRESERVE Razor, $6.99 (recycline.com) The handle of this sleek twinbladed razor is made from 100 percent recycled plastic (65 percent of which comes from Stonyfield Farm yogurt cups).

January 2005 www.plentymag.com

POWDER PROTECTION PLAN 10

TOM ZUCCARENO

NORTH AMERICAN SKI RESORTS MATCH WORLD-CLASS SKIING WITH SPARKLING ENVIRONMENTAL RECORDS TO MAKE FOR THE ULTIMATE ECO-SKI EXPERIENCE

BY KATE SIBER

www.plentymag.com January 2005

P L E N T Y | 43

O

n an October morning in 1998, the day before bulldozers broke ground on a 645-acre expansion project, a vicious fire swept through five buildings and four lifts at Vail mountain resort, inflicting $12 million worth of damage in a matter of hours. Two days later, the Earth Liberation Front, the notoriously violent environmental activist organization, claimed the act in defense of the lynx, whose habitat the development would decimate.

Environmentalists, ski-industry insiders, and community members across the country condemned the act, allegedly the largest incident of environmental terrorism the country has ever seen. Though reprehensible, the deed served as a shot of adrenaline to a comatose ski industry. Many resorts that had hardly batted an eyelash at their ecological impact stood up and took a critical look at their operations. The Vail fires, however, were just one dramatic scene in a lengthy play. In the past three years, books such as Downhill Slide, by former SKI magazine editor Hal Clifford, have harshly criticized the ways of the corporate ski industry and rocked many in the ski community. But the real muscle behind the motivator lies in this hard fact: The earth is getting warmer.

Says Auden Schendler, Aspen’s environmental affairs director, “We have the most pressing environmental issue ever to face the planet: climate change. This should be the rallying issue for the ski industry.” It is fast becoming one. The news on the climate front is bad for everyone, but for people who make a living off snow, the news is even worse. Last summer, iconic peaks in the Alps, like the Matterhorn and Mont Blanc, crumbled during a deadly heat wave. A December 2003 United Nations report warned that if things don’t change fast, ski resorts with a base below 5,000 feet may not even receive enough snow to open by the end of the century. (Translation: no skiing on the East coast.) And average snowpack in the Colorado River basin is slated to decrease 30 percent by 2050, according to a January report in the scientific journal Climatic Change.

Two years after the Vail fires, an environmental groundswell hit the ski community as the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA) founded Sustainable Slopes, an environmental charter for ski areas. In a remarkable show of solidarity, more than 170 areas have signed on, pledging to conserve energy and to protect wildlife. In 2001, the NSAA joined forces with the nonprofit Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) to kick off “Keep Winter Cool,” a climate-change education and awareness campaign. And as of this spring, more than 70 resorts nationwide had signed a lobby in support of the McCain-Lieberman Climate Stewardship Act. “In terms of global warming, the ski industry is ahead of the curve,” says Dan Lashof, science director of the NRDC Climate Center. “The evidence has accumulated to the point where ski areas are taking notice. I think they really could and need to set an example.” Though the NSAA’s charter has been criticized by many environmentalists for not going far enough, it has certainly raised awareness—among resort offices as well as skiers on the slopes—of a critical issue.

The perception of the ski industry as a trail-razing, diesel-spewing, high-rise-hotel-building monster is simply no longer valid. The staff at resorts are putting real effort into reducing emissions and the impact on wildlife, buying renewable energy, and educating guests. All of the new buildings in Aspen and at Smugglers’ Notch are green-designed. The free shuttle buses at Alpine Meadows run on biodiesel. The owners of Moonlight Basin have set aside thousands of acres of land for wildlife habitat conservation.

Yes, there is a contingent of resorts that refuses to curb expansions and continues to guzzle energy, but the prognosis is promising. So go enjoy what these ten pioneering resorts have to offer—ride the wind-powered lifts, eat at upscale organic restaurants, and participate in eye-opening nature tours. Most of all, enjoy the pines, the mountains, and the powder. Thanks to the efforts of these resorts, we’re betting this kind of natural splendor will be preserved for long-term future enjoyment.

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January 2005 www.plentymag.com

GLITZY, GLAMOROUS, AND GREEN

ASPEN, COLORADO

TOM ZUCCARENO

Aspen may seem like a mini-Madison Avenue, with Prada, Fendi, and Gucci boutiques lining its elegant streets, but think outside the Tiffany’s box. This Colorado mountain town is home to one of the most environmentally committed winter resorts in the country, not to mention some world-class skiing. While Aspen Mountain is famous for its steeps, skiers can find their favorite flavor at any of Aspen Skiing Company’s nearby resorts. Take the family to Snowmass Village, surf the gigantic Highland Bowl at Aspen Highlands, or perfect your 180s at Buttermilk’s two-mile terrain park, one of the longest in the world.

www.plentymag.com January 2005

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GLITZY, GLAMOROUS, AND GREEN

ASPEN, COLORADO

STOREFRONTS GLOW AT DUSK in Aspen (above); the Sundeck Restaurant (right), one of eleven environmentally certified buildings in the world.

coming from the kitchen. After a pilot program in 2002, the city of Aspen now runs all of its snowcats on biodiesel and buys only recycled motor oil. But this is just a small example of the resort’s big-level approach to environmental responsibility. Many projects—ranging from a wind-powered lift to a new no-impact hydroelectric project, which uses a turbine and snowmaking pipes to process spring runoff—help markedly decrease Aspen’s energy use. The Aspen Skiing Company is a model in the ski industry and is home to several environmental firsts, such as the creation of an environmental affairs department in 1997; the Environment Foundation, which donates company-matched employee contributions to community projects, in 1998; and the Sundeck Restaurant, one of the first LEED-certified buildings in Colorado, in 1999.

BEYOND THE SLOPES: Located in a turn-of-the-century Victorian five blocks from Aspen’s lifts, Explore Booksellers and Bistro houses both a cozy independent bookstore and a first-class restaurant.

After browsing the new fiction, you can sit next to the fire for a savory organic vegetarian meal. Menus change seasonally, but the stellar vegan desserts remain the same. Don’t leave without trying the famous carrot cake (970-925-5338).

WHERE TO STAY: The one-, two-, and three-bedroom condominiums at the Snowmass Club, located nine miles from Aspen, have woodburning fireplaces, king-size beds, and mountain views. This summer, high-insulation siding and windows were installed to increase

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efficiency. The Club’s 19,000-square-foot athletic facility, which has everything from treadmills to hot tubs, is one of the greenest commercial buildings in the state. Built from sustainably harvested wood, and equipped with a super-insulated roof and recycled carpet, it now operates solely on wind power. Rates start at $225 for a one-bedroom villa (800-525-0710, www.snowmassclub.com).

ESSENTIAL INFO: Lift tickets are $74 each and are also good for Aspen Highlands, Buttermilk, and Snowmass resorts, all within ten miles of town (800-525-6200, www.aspensnowmass.com). For more information about the area, contact the Aspen Chamber Resort Association (800-670-0792, www.aspenchamber.org).

January 2005 www.plentymag.com

PHOTOGRAPHS BY HAL WILLIAMS, MICHAEL BRANDS

THE ECO-BUZZ: Smell those French fries? That aroma might not be

GREEN BY DESIGN Robert Redford’s sustainable resort has a spa (left) that uses reclaimed lumber and efficient heating, Stewart Falls (below) and glassblowing (lower left) are other attractions.

IT TAKES A VILLAGE

Disgusted by overdevelopment in the northern part of the state, Robert Redford, at the age of 33, bought up 6,000 acres of pristine land in Utah’s Wasatch Range in 1969. Slowly and organically, a community for nature and the arts known as Sundance Village grew. Now, 35 years later, even with 180 houses, several restaurants, a spa, an art center, and a ski resort, everything in the community is done under sustainable and conservationist principles. Revel in Utah’s famous light, dry powder at Sundance Resort, but be sure to explore everything this remarkable community has to offer, from almost 15 miles of Nordic trails to art workshops and flavorful mountain-style cuisine.

THE ECO-BUZZ: Designed to maintain the character of the land, all of the buildings on the property are lowprofile and built with materials that blend in with the landscape. Many have incorporated green-design principles, such as the spa, which has sunflower-hull wallboard, reclaimed lumber, and an efficient heating system.

What’s so unusual about Sundance, however, is its extraordinary commitment to conservation. The North Fork Preservation Alliance, a nonprofit that

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Redford founded in 1997, helps community members build smaller and greener houses, purchase recycled products, and reduce energy use. In 1998 Redford put 860 acres into a conservation easement to protect wildlife habitats, and last September a new nature center opened on the property to educate guests on the area’s ecology. And another not-so-minor detail: 10 percent of the entire resort is run on wind energy.

BEYOND THE SLOPES: With so much to experience here, from winepairing courses to film screenings, you will not be in want of après-ski activities. If you’re lucky, your visit will coincide with the residence of glassblowers from Tlaquepaque, Mexico. Watch as they transform discarded glass bottles from the resort’s recycling bins into vases, pitchers, and plates.

WHERE TO STAY: Walk from the slopes to a cozy guest cottage in Sundance Village. Decorated with Native American art, many of these are situated in aspen groves and have wood-burning fireplaces and decks. Like the rest of the resort, the cottages are partially run on wind power. Rates for studios start at $235 (800-8921600, www.sundanceresort.com).

ESSENTIAL INFO: Lift tickets are $40 each; $30, Monday to Friday.

(801-223-4849, www.sundanceresort.com). Take a look at www.travel.utah.gov for a wealth of information about visiting Utah.

January 2005 www.plentymag.com

SUSAN SPAETH

SUNDANCE, UTAH

THE GREEN MOUNTAIN STATE’S BEST-KEPT SECRET

Smugglers’ Notch may not have as big of a name as other Vermont resorts such as Stowe, Killington, and Sugarbush, but, little known to the outside world, the skiing is just as good. A fantastic familyoriented resort, it has one of the most reputable ski schools in the country and plenty of beginner and intermediate terrain. An even better kept secret about Smuggs is the mountain’s wild side. The four most difficult trails—Liftline, Freefall, Black Hole, and Robin’s Run—are some of the toughest and most technical on the East coast, with hair-raising drops, tightly grown trees, and Volkswagen-size moguls. Our only recommendation: Bring a helmet.

THE ECO-BUZZ: Even the cows seem to prefer organic grass in Vermont. The state is a bastion of environmental awareness, and its ski areas are no exception. Smugglers’ Notch in particular has been impressively ahead of the environmental curve for years, starting with a recycling program in the 1980s. Last season the resort inaugurated SkiCool, a campaign to provide “climate-neutral” skiing.

Through SkiCool, skiers can buy “green” lift tickets and season passes, which cost up to $10 more, the resort matches 25 percent of the funds raised, which then go to Native Energy, a renewable-energy company, to build new wind-farm technology in the Dakotas.

The resort also walks its talk operationally: Every year water auditors check for leaks in low-flow aerators in all bathroom facilities.

Everything from demolition material to food waste heads to the recycling bins, and Smuggs also has the Living Machine, an ecological waste-treatment facility that was the first in the state.

BEYOND THE SLOPES: Smugglers’ may be in the backwoods, but Burlington, Vermont, is only a 45-minute drive away. When your ski legs are wobbly, take off for a day and tour the independent bookstores, small cafés, and local artisans’ shops that line pedestrianonly Church Street (www.churchstmarketplace.com). Gather gifts at the Peace & Justice Store, a nonprofit purveyor of free trade goods (802-863-2345, www.pjcvt.org).

WHERE TO STAY: Every new building developed at Smuggs since 1996 has been green-designed and rated with five stars from Efficiency Vermont, the state government’s energy efficiency utility. Stay at the Falcons, which has in-room whirlpool tubs and fireplaces. Built in 2001, the passive-solardesigned building has efficient fluorescent lighting and extra insulation. Packages that include lodging, lift tickets, and lessons start at $99 per day for adults and $79 for kids (800-451-8752, www.smuggs.com).

ESSENTIAL INFO: Lift tickets are $56 each (800451-8752, www.smuggs.com). Contact the Lamoille Valley Chamber of Commerce (877247-8693, www.stowesmugglers.org) or the Smugglers’ Notch Area Chamber of Commerce (www.smugnotch.com) for travel information.

BRING A HELMET Smugglers’ Notch has some of the toughest trails on the East Coast, and the state’s first eco-treatment facility, called the Living Machine (left).

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January 2005 www.plentymag.com

ALL PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY SMUGGLERS’ NOTCH RESORT.

SMUGGLERS’ NOTCH, VERMONT

GO WEST Wilderness skiing right from the lifts is just one of the pleasures (above, right) that Jackson Hole offers to expert skiers. Alpine House (below) provides an excellent antidote to a tough day on the slopes.

WESTERN WILDERNESS VACATION

If the statistics don’t convince you of Jackson Hole’s reputation as an expert mecca (4,139 vertical feet, 2,500 skiable acres, and a 460-inch annual snowfall), its hairy terrain and snarky attitude will.

Jackson has an open-gate policy and was the first resort in the country to offer guided backcountry skiing from the lifts. Without a doubt, the backcountry options are second to none: You can ski right into the abutting portion of Bridger-Teton National Forest or Grand Teton National Park. But not to worry. Even though Jackson is a major Western resort, it has a far better environmental track record than its notorious corporate counterparts. So enjoy the pow, the steeps, and the view—those thousands of square miles of wilderness aren’t disappearing anytime soon.

THE ECO-BUZZ: Ninety-seven percent of Teton County is protected wilderness, and Jackson Hole Mountain Resort is committed to keeping it that way. Two lifts are run on wind power, and the resort spends over $100,000 a year on free bus passes for employees and season-pass holders. Guests have the opportunity to pitch in too, with the Green Pass program. An extra $1 to $10 spent on a lift tick-

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et goes straight to the nonprofit American Forests, which plants trees in Yellowstone’s fire- and blister-rust-damaged areas. Jackson is also in the middle of a five-year lighting retrofit project, but all of this is just the tip of the iceberg: For the next two years, Jackson will work to become the country’s first ISO-14001-certified private ski area. The certification, from the International Standardization Organization, will require all departments throughout the ski area to have standardized, environmentally impeccable operations.

BEYOND THE SLOPES: Not all of the memorable museums are in the nation’s big cities. The National Museum of Wildlife Art is three miles north of town on a butte overlooking the 25,000-acre National Elk Refuge. The collection includes more than 2,300 depictions of wildlife, from 4,000-year-old Native American artifacts to John James Audubon and Albert Bierstadt paintings (800313-9553, www.wildlifeart.org).

WHERE TO STAY: Former Olympic skiers Hans and Nancy Johnstone have the perfect antidote to a day spent negotiating Jackson’s steeps.

At their Scandinavian-style Alpine House, indulge in cozy rooms with down comforters and country antiques. The owners run their establishment partially on wind power, use only eco-friendly cleaning solvents, and stock bathrooms with local and all-natural products. Doubles start at $100 (800-753-1421, www.alpinehouse.com).

ESSENTIALS: Lift tickets are $67 each (888-333-7766, www.jacksonhole.com). For more information on the area, contact the Jackson Hole Chamber of Commerce (307-733-3316, www.jacksonholechamber.com).

January 2005 www.plentymag.com

PHOTOGRAPHS BY CHIN; GILLMAN.

JACKSON HOLE, WYOMING

INTERNATIONAL SKI MECCA

PHOTOGRAPHS ERIK GRAHAM, UPPER RIGHT; GREG GRIFFITH, LOWER RIGHT; YOKO YAMAMOTO, CENTER.

WHISTLER BLACKCOMB, BRITISH COLUMBIA Pop quiz: What ski resort is home to the largest vertical drop on the continent? Not only can Whistler Blackcomb, in Whistler, British Columbia, make that claim to fame, but it also has an astounding 8,171 acres of skiable terrain. With so much mountain, no skier is in want of options. They are as many and varied as the international clientele Whistler serves: Choose among large, treeless bowls, a 15,000-year-old glacier, and beautiful cedar-and-pine glades. The best part? With so much land, you can still find powder stashes all over the mountains days after a big storm.

THE ECO-BUZZ: Those Canadians must know something we don’t.

Whistler has some impressive mountain stats and an equally impressive environmental record. The resort recycles more than half a million beverage containers annually, has reduced total waste by 30 percent each year for the past four years, and carried out modifications in the last year that will reduce total energy use by 11 percent. The Whistler Blackcomb Foundation holds fund-raising events and donates the proceeds to community projects ranging from white-bark pine studies to fish-habitat-protection projects.

But the resort is not the only do-gooder in town. Since the 1970s, the municipality itself has been determined to grow sustainably. It has limited the amount of growth in the valley, and as a result, Whistler is a compact, extremely pedestrian-friendly town. As the 2010 Winter Olympics approach, both town and resort officials are determined to make Whistler an exemplar of sustainability, with extensive public-transit systems, green-designed buildings, and clean-energy use all around. Go Canada!

BEYOND THE SLOPES: Even if your quads are still burning from the seven-mile run you just bombed, nothing is too far in Whistler.

Limp over to Solarice Wellness Centre & Spa and choose from an extensive menu of holistic Ayurvedic treatments, massages, and organic facials (888-9351222, www.solarice.com).

WHERE TO STAY: Though a stay at the 550-room Fairmont Château Whistler is a splurge—you’ll have prime access to a hot tub, gourmet restaurants, and a spa—your conscience can rest as easy as your quads. This hotel is a model of sustainable practices: Kitchen staff recycle all food waste into compost; managers have recoded in-house washing machines to save as much as 1.7 million liters of water a year; and most of the hotel’s light fixtures have been retrofitted. Doubles start at C$149, depending on availability (800-606-8244, www.fairmont.com/ whistler).

ESSENTIAL INFO: Lift tickets are C$73 and are good at both Whistler and Blackcomb mountains (866-218-9690, www.whistler-blackcomb.com). Contact Tourism Whistler for travel information (877991-9988, www.mywhistler.com).

www.plentymag.com January 2005

SNOWSHOERS use the extensive terrain for exploring (top) while powder skiers venture into the wilds (below). A winter sleigh ride (left) through magical landscapes is one of the treats awaiting skiiers at the end of the day.

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WHITE MOUNTAINS WEEKEND GETAWAY

Sitting at the base of Mount Washington, the highest peak in the Northeast, Bretton Woods is nationally known for its high-quality snow. And in the past four years, it has become a real player on the eastern ski scene, with visits increasing 60 percent. What’s up?

People are finding out that Bretton Woods has all the ingredients for a delicious weekend getaway. It’s only a two-and-a-half-hour drive north of Boston; it’s surrounded by some of the East’s best mountain scenery, and the skiing is unintimidating and perfect for families.

THE ECO-BUZZ: Though the owners of Bretton Woods have spent $10 million on improvements in the past eight years, this was no slash-and-burn development. The newly renovated base lodge, opened last winter, is a model of environmental design. More than half of the roof systems and walls were replaced with better insulating materials, 80 percent of the old incandescent bulbs were swapped for fluorescent, and the bathroom facilities were completely renovated with low-flow fixtures. The construction of new trails was also as ecological as possible—the many trees left standing make excellent glades, and trails have been revegetated with a native high-alpine plant mix. All of the new snowmaking guns are 25 percent more efficient than traditional snowmaking equipment, and, of course, the resort recycles everything possible, nearly a third of its total waste, from glass bottles to antifreeze.

BEYOND THE SLOPES: The Highland Center at Crawford Notch, about five miles east of Bretton Woods, will make you feel like

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you’re in summer camp again, except without the icky camp food. If you don’t have time for one of the multiday workshops, such as ice climbing or nature photography, take part in a free tour of the green-designed property or a lesson on White GRAND HOTEL Built in 1902, the Mount Mountain natural history Washington Hotel and the Princess Lounge lie at the base of the mountain, (603-466-2727, www.out- (above) surrounded by 18,000 acres of national doors.org). forest.

WHERE TO STAY: The Highland Lodge, at the Highland Center, is a brand-new building with eyepopping environmental features. No detail was spared in the 35room abode: All of the furnishings were made with sustainably and locally harvested wood, the beams were recycled from a defunct shipping wharf, and the frame is made of recycled steel. Even the welcome mats are made of recycled airplane tires. Rates start at $54, including breakfast and dinner (603-466-2727, www.outdoors.org/lodging/highland).

ESSENTIAL INFO: Lift tickets are $59 each (800-314-1752, www.brettonwoods.com). For more information on activities and travel in the Mount Washington Valley, contact the visitor’s bureau (800-367-3364, www.mtwashingtonvalley.org).

January 2005 www.plentymag.com

PHOTOGRAPHS COURTESY BRETTON WOODS RESORT.

BRETTON WOODS, NEW HAMPSHIRE

LAKE TAHOE LOCALS’ STASH

ALPINE MEADOWS, CALIFORNIA

PHOTOGRAPHS BY ROBYN SCARTON; RIGHT AND LARRY PROSOR, ABOVE RIGHT.

From Heavenly to Squaw Valley, the Lake Tahoe area is crammed with ski resorts and high-rise hotels. Amid the ruckus, Alpine Meadows is a refreshing change. The resort, with 2.400 acres of skiable terrain, shares a boundary with Squaw, and the skiing is equally fun, without the crowds and the hype. The crowning glory to the Alpine Meadows experience is the open-boundary policy. Welcome to the land of lift-accessible backcountry skiing! Or if you’re not the adventurous type, you can always content yourself by surfing gigantic Sherwood Bowl or weaving through pines on Promised Land.

With nearly 500 inches of snow piling up on the slopes at Alpine Meadows every year, it’s impossible to have a bad day.

THE ECO-BUZZ: No big base area, slope-side lodging, or grandiose development plans here. Unlike many of its neighbors, Alpine Meadows isn’t all about posh real estate. What’s more, it has a slew of exciting environmental initiatives in place. This season marks the fourth that all of the free shuttle buses, which run from Truckee to Lake Tahoe, will operate on biodiesel. Lighting retrofits in lodges and new motion-detectors have markedly reduced energy use. The resort has also done extensive soil-erosion control studies and revegetated trails with native plants. Bonus: If you have kids, take a cruise along the Eco-Trail, off the beginner Subway lift, which has educational panels on local animals, plants, and environmental issues.

BEYOND THE SLOPES: Thinking ahead pays off: After a long, hard day on the slopes, come home to fresh organic veggies, wine, and bread delivered to your doorstep. Lisa’s Central Market, based in Truckee, delivers organic goods—everything from sandwiches to soy milk—throughout the Tahoe area.

You can order by phone or online ($9.99 delivery charge; 530-582-2280, www.lisascentralmarket.com).

WHERE TO STAY: Stanford University’s cozy Alpine Chalet is no dorm: The breakfasts are hearty and home cooked, the views are second to none, and there’s a hot tub for postski therapy. New manager John Drollette is determined to make this pad as eco-friendly as possible. He’s put in 100 compact fluorescent bulbs, cut down on excess energy use, and implemented an extensive recycling system. Doubles start at $120, including breakfast.

(530-583-1550, www.stanfordalumni.org/learningtravel/sierra).

ESSENTIAL INFO: Lift tickets are $39 each (800-441-4423, www.skialpine.com). Contact the North Lake Tahoe Resort Association (888-434-1262, www.mytahoevacation.com) for travel information.

A SUNRISE SKIER carves through the snow. Pristine powder and 2,400 skiable acres (above) are what make Alpine Meadows unforgettable.

www.plentymag.com January 2005

P L E N T Y | 55

PACIFIC NORTHWEST VOLCANO SKIING

You don’t necessarily have to trek to Mauna Loa to catch a glimpse of a volcano. Unbeknownst to many, Mount Bachelor, in the Deschutes National Forest near Bend, Oregon, is a dormant volcano. In the winter you can ski more or less any part of the coneshaped hill—just watch out for the fumaroles. Bachelor isn’t known for its heart-stopping steeps, but you’ll find heavenly tree-skiing hidden in its staggering 3,365-foot vertical. If you’re a boarder, its three terrain parks are perfect for practicing your tricks.

THE ECO-BUZZ: Big news this year: Mount Bachelor is committed to buying enough green energy to power its Sunrise Express lift, and it’s launching a “Green Tag” program. Through the program, guests can buy $2 or $20 tags at the ticket windows. Funds raised go to the Bonneville Environmental Foundation to buy green power—$20 prevents 1,400 pounds of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere—and develop new sources of green energy. But these aren’t the first environmental moves by the resort. Water and light fixtures have been replaced with more efficient models, and about a quarter of all waste is diverted from landfills through an extensive recycling program. Want more stats? Bachelor’s award-winning public-

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January 2005 www.plentymag.com

PHOTOGRAPHS KAVA, LEFT; CHRIS JOHNSTON,, ABOVE.

MOUNT BACHELOR, OREGON

NEW ENGLAND, BACK IN TIME

MAD RIVER GLEN, VERMONT

PHOTOGRAPHS MIKE RIDDELL, UPPER RIGHT; DAVE WACHS, ABOVE.

SUMMIT OF THE WORLD Dormant volcano Mount Bachelor in Oregon (left and this page) is famed for fumaroles and tree-skiing.

Snowboarders like Peter Butsch, (below left) love the three terrain parks for practicing their fancy footwork.

transit system, which ferries folks to and from Bend, 20 miles away, saves more than 1 million vehicle miles a year.

BEYOND THE SLOPES: Forest-service naturalists provide free 90minute snowshoe tours from the base area of Mount Bachelor.

Explore the Deschutes National Forest while learning about winter ecology and geology from an area expert. For information, contact the resort or the Deschutes National Forest (541-383-5300, www.fs.fed.us/r6/centraloregon).

WHERE TO STAY: Eagle Crest is a minivillage of a resort, located near Bend and about 45 minutes from Mount Bachelor. There’s a fitness center, a pool, and a spa on the grounds, but don’t worry about outof-control development. The resort’s Green Team makes sure all new buildings incorporate sustainable principles. Eagle Crest buys wind energy and has won awards for its extensive recycling system.

Simple but comfortable doubles start at $75 (800-682-4786, www.eagle-crest.com).

ESSENTIAL INFO: Lift tickets are $46 each (800-829-2442, www.mtbachelor.com). Contact the Bend Visitor Bureau (877-2458484, www.visitbend.com) for travel information.

www.plentymag.com January 2005

Forget about swank hotels, bumping nightclubs, and on-mountain espresso shacks. At Mad River Glen, it’s all about the skiing. You can also forget about bunny slopes. The Vermont area’s slogan is “Ski it if you can,” and that’s no joke.

Test your mettle off the four famous expert runs—Fall Line, the Chute, Catamount Bowl, and Paradise. Or don’t even stay on the trail: You’ll also find some of the East Coast’s best tree-skiing. If you think this place is old school, you’re right. Its trail map hasn’t changed since the 1960s, and it is home to the last surviving single-person chairlift in the country, as well as a 1948 base lodge, to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places this winter.

THE ECO-BUZZ: In 1995 owner Betsy Pratt wanted to put Mad River up for sale. Dismayed at the thought of the ski hill falling into the hands of out-of-state developers, she organized a group of 1,000 locals, who bought it for $2.5 million. Now the area is the only cooperatively owned, nonprofit ski establishment in the country. It already had a tiny ecological footprint, and the stakeholders are hellbent on keeping it that way. Nothing has or will change: no new trails, developments, or snowmaking. Even the cafeteria still serves hamburgers on ceramic plates, rather than disposables. But the best part of the area’s commitment to sustainability is its award-winning nature program. Two years ago, on-staff naturalist Sean Lawson transformed an old lift shack into the ski-in Kent Thomas Nature Center, equipped with a local artist’s mural of the region’s different forests and rotating geology and wild animal exhibits. Lawson also offers two-hour snowshoe nature tours through the mountain’s forests every weekend ($25, including snowshoe rental).

BEYOND THE SLOPES: American Flatbread in Waitsfield is just a hop from Mad River Glen. Most ingredients, from the naturally raised maple-fennel sausage to the homemade Vermont goat cheese, are organic and locally produced. If your timing is right, you’ll be in town for a monthly benefit bake, during which American Flatbread donates as much as $10 per pizza to a worthy local cause (802-4968856, www.americanflatbread.com).

WHERE TO STAY: Base your stay at the Wilder Farm Inn, where new owners Linda and Luke Iannuzzi make delicious breakfasts out of organic and local ingredients. Doubles start at $125. (800-4968878, www.wilderfarminn.com). But don’t miss the chance to stay in the region’s most deluxe low-impact lodging. The Stark’s Nest is known as the Buckingham Palace of Long Trail shelters, and it sits just below the top of Mad River’s single lift. Bring a sleeping bag and a stove for making dinner. There’s a wood-burning fireplace for s’mores and enough logs to keep the place toasty all night.

ESSENTIAL INFO: Lift tickets are $50 each (802-496-3551, www.madriverglen.com). For information about visiting the Mad River Valley, contact the Sugarbush Chamber of Commerce (800828-4748, www.madrivervalley.com).

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PRESERVING THE LAND Skiing down Headwaters, one of Moonlight’s great runs (left). Moonlight Lodge at night (below) has memorable dining, a spa, and ice skating, as well as great views of Lone Mountain.

NEW RESORT, FRESH IDEAS

Bordering Big Sky Resort on Montana’s Lone Mountain, Moonlight Basin is one of the country’s first full-fledged ski resorts to have opened since the 1980s. Early reports reveal A+ terrain—think steep chutes and bowls followed by long, rolling cruisers—but Moonlight deserves extra credit for its unconventional approach to development. The native Montana owners are determined to preserve the quality of the land, which is surrounded by hundreds of acres of protected wilderness. For every acre developed, they’ve made sure that more than two are preserved for wildlife habitats.

THE ECO-BUZZ: “We wanted to do what we felt was right for the property,” says Joe Vujovich, Moonlight Basin co-owner. After buying 25,000 acres of highly coveted land from Plum Creek Lumber in 1992, Vujovich and co-owners Lee Poole and Keith Brown discovered forests ravaged by logging and pine-beetle infestations. For the next eleven years, they worked on putting 85 percent of the land into conservation easements or in the hands of conservation organizations. Though 2,500 acres were set aside to build a ski area, the development was as ecological as possible. Many trails were gladed, rather than clear-cut, and constructed areas have been immediately reseeded with native plants. Wildlife corridors and drainages were always avoided, and the real estate development was concentrated at the bottom of the hill on 640 acres. Nothing can convince these ecosensitive developers to do wrong. For years they have been under

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pressure to pave a road through the property, which would connect two major towns and bring more visitors to Big Sky. Kudos to them: For now Big Sky will remain wild and remote.

BEYOND THE SLOPES: If you come to the area, you can’t leave without visiting iconic Yellowstone, the country’s first national park, located just outside Big Sky. The best way to explore this grand daddy of wilderness areas is with your own naturalist, on snowshoes or cross-country skis. Lone Mountain Ranch offers daylong trips for $95 (800-514-4644, www.lmranch.com).

WHERE TO STAY: All of Moonlight’s log cabins are concentrated at the bottom of the hill. You’ll have ski-in/ski-out access, a kitchen, and a hot tub. Don’t be surprised if elk meander by your deck in the morning. Two-bedroom cabins start at $218 per night (800-8454428, www.eastwestbigsky.com).

ESSENTIAL INFO: Lift tickets are $40 each (406-993-6000, www.moonlightbasin.com). For help planning a vacation to the area, visit www.bigskychamber.com.

January 2005 www.plentymag.com

PHOTOGRAPH TOP, JOE IRON.

MOONLIGHT BASIN, MONTANA

Ph: Cookie Kinkead

Signature golf course, excellent tennis, private beach, exquisite villas, superb cuisine, and a dedicated staff.

Ph: Cookie Kinkead

The

Tryall Club, Jamaica

Where you belong.

www.tryallclub.com Phone: 800/238-5290 or: 876/956-5660

THE END OF OIL?

The question is not whether our sources of cheap fuel will dry up, but when.

And what can we do about it now?

BY MICHAEL W. ROBBINS You slide into the driver’s seat of your Chevy Trailblazer on a Saturday morning in early August. You turn the key, and the 4.2-liter, 275-horsepower engine rumbles to life. The air conditioner adds its higherpitched roar, blowing warm air at first; then, gradually, cooler air streams from the vents. To speed the cool-off, you push down the buttons that electrically lower the side windows. You lever the transmission into D and ease down your recently recoated asphalt driveway.

You’re off to the nearest convenience store to buy juice, a gallon of milk, and maybe some doughnuts for the kids. And to the wineshop for a bottle of Chardonnay. As the neatly landscaped houses slide past, you notice that your Chevy’s gas gauge is down to about a quarter of a tank.

Might as well fill up while you’re at the store.

Exactly 8.7 miles and four traffic lights from your driveway, you turn into the parking lot of the Cumberland Farms store, shut off the engine, and head inside. If you had been paying close attention, you might have noticed that you burned exactly one gallon of gasoline during that short drive.

When you bought the Trailblazer—“loaded,” as the salesman said, and a “great deal” for this model, which he said is “plenty strong enough to tow your boat trailer”—you noted from the window sticker that, according to EPA standards, this model gets 16 mpg in the city and 21 mpg on the highway. But in practice, maybe with the AC turned on and with all the start-stop driving you do, your mileage is not quite 16. It’s more like 8.7 mpg. A little troubling, but the last time you mentioned it to the service guy at your Chevy dealer, he smiled and shrugged and said something about “individual driving styles,” suggesting that maybe you were a bit more lead-footed than was good for your gas mileage.

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That gallon of gasoline most likely cost you more than $2. Seems a bit high, but it’s actually less than the gallon of milk you left home to buy. Certainly a whole lot cheaper than a bottle of Chardonnay.

Oddly, both the milk and the wine are renewable—cows and vineyards just keep turning the stuff out—while the cheaper gallon of gas is not. It is one tiny portion of a finite resource, which means neither we the people, nor Mother Nature, nor God are making any more of the crude oil from which your gallon of gasoline was refined. There is only so much of it deep down in the earth. There has only ever been so much of it in the earth, and when that supply is burned up, there ain’t gonna be no more.

Not to power your Chevy, not to heat your house and office, not to make asphalt for your driveway, not for the fertilizer and herbicides that support all those green suburban lawns, not for the plastics in which nearly everything in the convenience store is packaged, not for the petrochemicals that are the essential ingredients of so many products in your life that it’s hard even to begin to list them.

It’s impossible to say precisely where your particular gallon of gasoline might have originated—possibly from the Middle East, or from under the waters of the Gulf of Mexico, from a troubled river delta in Nigeria, or maybe even from Russia. Even though you bought it from an Exxon/Mobil station, it could well have been discovered, extracted, processed, shipped, and refined by half a dozen or more oil companies before its delivery to the fuel pump.

What can be said is that the crude oil from which your gallon of gas was refined originated as decaying organic matter deposited during hundreds of millions of years and was probably discovered decades ago in sedimentary layers that were once located somewhere between January 2005 www.plentymag.com

PHOTOGRAPH BY FRANCIS MURPHY. ABIGAIL WEARS GAELYN & GIANFRIANI.

7,500 feet and 15,000 feet beneath the surface of the earth. It was down there in a kind of pool or layer and was drilled into by a rotary steel bit at the end of a continuous, rotating steel pipe, powered by a very strong diesel engine. The crude oil rose to the surface, was pumped to a tank and then through a pipeline to a seaport (again, propelled by big diesel engines), transferred to an enormous steel tanker and transported (in a vessel, again, driven by powerful oil-fired internal combustion engines) across leagues of tossing ocean, to a port in the United States, say, to Houston, or Port Angeles, Washington, or Elizabeth, New Jersey. There, the crude oil was fed through a refinery, stored, and shipped, possibly via railroad or in a stainless-steel tank truck (again, powered by a diesel engine burning refined petroleum fuel) and thence to your local “filling station.”

Although we American drivers pay comparatively little for our gasoline, far less than our contemporaries in Europe, some of us consumers have been grumbling about high prices. There has been congressional bloviating about the soaring price of gas and threats of investigations of something or other. Some have even suggested that we tap into our emergency fuel supply, the Strategic Petroleum Reserves, to force down the price of gasoline. Oil companies, for their part, routinely blame the high price of gasoline, especially in California, on environmental regulations.

But let’s look at the big picture. For most adult American consumers, gasoline has—for most of our lives—been essentially a negligible cost. Petroleum fuels are traditionally so cheap in the United States that unless you are directly in the business of transporting people or goods long distances, you probably lack a common-sense, intuitive appreciation about how much fuel really costs. And cheap energy—not just to power our SUVs, lawn tractors, motorcycles, and outboards, but also to heat and to cool our houses and stores and offices, to trundle all our consumer goods from one coast to the other—is so integral a part of how we live that we have serious trouble imagining a life in which energy is a major expense. Many Americans, especially suburban-dwelling Americans, simply cannot buy a gallon of milk without burning a gallon of gasoline—never mind all the gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel that got burned up in getting both the gasoline and the milk to a convenience store that’s within shopping distance of your residence. The United States consumes more of the world’s oil than any other nation, and at least 45 percent of our consumption is for motor fuel.

Gasoline has been so cheap for us that we have forgotten that it is a finite resource. It gets a bit easier to imagine a day when the fuel lines dry up completely as gas prices continue to climb, and some are now concerned that this rise is a sign that we are already beginning to run out of oil. “Prices for motor fuel today are the basement,” says Bill Reinert, national manager of the Advanced Technologies Group of Toyota USA. “We’ll have $2.00 to $2.50 a gallon for some time.”

But the haunting question still lurks out there, like a time-bomb ticking under our energy-profligate lifestyle: When will we run out of oil? When, not if.

Actually, most experts agree that this is not the most important question, because the big changes in the world’s economy and in almost everyone’s life will occur long before we get down to the final few barrels of oil. The significant changes, most agree, will start to occur when oil production has peaked—when the world has used up half the finite supply, and, ever afterward, oil production can only

decline. Until it’s all gone.

So the more crucial question is: When will the world’s oil supply peak? And the troubling questions following that one are: Then what happens to civilization as we know it? And then what do we do?

Currently, the answers to these questions depend on whether one is an Optimist or a Pessimist about the world’s oil supply.

IS THE TANK HALF-EMPTY OR HALF-FULL? Optimists generally include the world’s petroleum companies, in particular, the “American” companies; the American automobile industry; and most of the U.S. government—and you, that is to say, American consumers who are responsible for over half of the world’s oil consumption. Pessimists include numerous scientists (especially geologists), environmentalists, and diverse observers of world-energy trends. The reality is not quite so black and white as all automakers cheerleading for gas-guzzling SUVs and all auto-phobic, alternative-energy promoters cheerleading for anything that does not burn a crude-oil product.

In fact, there are Pessimists among the energy companies, the automakers, and even within the U.S. government. But when it comes to who among the big players, the major corporations and government entities, is seriously addressing the crucial question of what we will do when production has peaked and oil begins drying up, the Optimist/Pessimist divide is very real and very meaningful.

The Optimists’ view? Certainly they know that crude oil will be gone “some day,” but they believe that day lies generations away, in the future. In the meantime, they act as if the world’s oil supply is all but infinite—with the automakers continuing to build as many lowgas-mileage cars as they can sell (fighting tooth and nail against any political efforts to mandate improvements in mileage); with American consumers paying scant attention to gas mileage or any other aspect of energy conservation; and with the U.S. government giving only lip service and minimal funding to the promotion and development of any energy sources other than fossil fuels.

For a distilled version of the Optimists’ persuasion, see almost any speech by President Bush’s secretary of energy, Spencer Abraham (the former governor of Michigan, the cradle of America’s automobile industry). His address to the American Petroleum Institute (API) in Dallas, Texas, on July 27, 2002, for instance, began with this statement: “Contrary to the views of some, oil will continue to serve as the backbone of our transportation industry for many years to come, and natural gas will be preferred for power-generation, home heating and cooling, and other uses for as long as we can extract it from the earth.”

Abraham said that to meet America’s energy needs in the next 20 years, we will have to build “1,300 to 1,900 new electric power plants,” improve such infrastructure hardware as our electric transmission lines and our pipelines, and “increase energy supply with special emphasis on domestic supply,” both by technological fixes, “to recover the very large amounts of oil and gas left in the ground after conventional production,” and by opening up new sources of oil, such as those beneath the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and in the Gulf of Mexico. He also underscored the need for increases in nuclear energy and the importance of government-funded research into the so-called clean coal technology.

Talking to an auditorium full of Texas petroleum types, Abraham tossed in a few lip-service remarks about conservation and reducing demand—but about renewable energy sources? Alternative fuel

“Global oil production will probably reach a peak sometime during this decade.

After the peak, the world’s production of crude oil will fall, never to rise again.”

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January 2005 www.plentymag.com

sources? Nary a word. He spoke as if the world’s crude-oil and natural-gas supplies were infinite, but just getting a tad more difficult to extract. No mention by Secretary Abraham of the inconvenient fact that oil production in Texas has been declining for decades.

Pessimists are probably fewer in number and lack the political and economic clout of the Optimists, but they include scientists with plenty of know-how on the subject of fossil fuels. Even before the recent run-up in crude-oil prices—, some have published, in a spate of books and magazine articles, sobering projections about the imminent exhaustion of cheap crude-oil supplies worldwide.

It is true that some prognosticators have been predicting the end of www.plentymag.com January 2005

oil practically from the beginning of oil, in 1859, when one Colonel Edwin Drake first struck black gold near Titusville, Pennsylvania. But this time around, the credentials are major, the experiences are well grounded, the information is more scientific, and a consensus seems to be forming that the decade we are in right now is the decade when world oil production is going to peak—and then decline forevermore.

The godfather of Pessimists on the subject of crude oil was a scientist named M. King Hubbert. A geophysicist who trained at the University of Chicago, Hubbert taught at Columbia University in the 1930s, then worked for Shell Oil at its research facility in Houston for some 25 years, back in the days when oil was a very big deal in the P L E N T Y | 63

economy of Texas, and when the United States was the world’s leading source of crude oil. After he retired from a distinguished career at Shell, he worked at the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) from 1964 to 1976. Sometime in the 1950s, Hubbert began to wonder about the future of oil in the United States, how much oil we’d already used up, and how much oil might still be found and extracted in the lower 48 states. He worked out a method of estimating the total U.S. oil supply, or how much oil remained, and then ran estimates of production and consumption rates. Hubbert concluded that, depending on which estimates of reserves proved more accurate over the coming years, American oil production would peak sometime in the early 1970s. He presented his prediction—which was understandably unpopular with his employers at Shell and with practically everyone else in the domestic oil business—at a meeting of the API in 1956. Hubbert’s pronouncement was met with howls of outrage and disbelief, and with furious efforts to prove him wrong. But then, in 1970, American oil production did hit its peak, and it has been declining ever since.

Hubbert was right. And that sharp point on the curve of oil production is now known as “Hubbert’s Peak.”

Many informed petro-scientists estimate that the Hubbert’s Peak of worldwide oil is at hand. Kenneth S. Deffeyes, a one-time colleague of Hubbert at Shell Oil and a professor emeritus of geology at Princeton University, begins his book Hubbert’s Peak: The Impending World Oil Shortage (Princeton University, 2003) with the words, “Global oil production will probably reach a peak sometime during this decade. After the peak, the world’s production of crude oil will fall, never to rise again.” He adds, “The slowdown in oil production may already be beginning; the current price fluctuations for crude oil [which hit a record high in late September, topping $50 a barrel], may be the preamble to a major crisis.”

That’s the Pessimists’ view. It’s been reinforced by other petro-scientists and authors, including Colin J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherrere, geologist veterans of worldwide “Big Oil” explorations and consultants with a respected Swiss energy firm, Petroconsultants of Geneva. In an article in Scientific American in 1998, “The End of Cheap Oil,” Campbell and Laherrere predicted that “within the next decade, the supply of conventional oil will be unable to keep up with demand.”

They also noted that estimates of remaining reserves are often distorted through the self-interest of the oil-producing nations themselves, that production cannot remain constant, and that it will become progressively slower and more difficult as supply diminishes. Campbell and Laherrere also pointed out that global discovery of new oil supplies actually peaked in the early 1960s, and that “about 80 percent of the oil produced today flows from fields that were found before 1973 and the great majority of them are declining” (italics added). Their conclusion—which has been hotly disputed ever since by Optimists—is that only about 1 trillion barrels of oil remain. That may sound like a lot of oil, but it is nearly equal to what we’ve already burned up, and global demand is escalating rapidly.

More recently, the Pessimists’ or “Peakists’” view has been underscored by two books on the world oil supply published in 2004: Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil (Dimensions), by David Goodstein, a professor of physics at Caltech, and The End of Oil: On the Edge of a Perilous New World (Houghton Mifflin), by business/environmental writer Paul Roberts. Goodstein explains the scientific principles and limitations that underpin the human uses of energy and the earth’s fos-

The only wiggle room left for us lies with politics, not science.

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sil-fuel supply. Following Hubbert’s conclusion about American oil, Goodstein flatly states that the “world will soon start to run out of conventionally produced, cheap oil,” and then considers the likely consequences of failing to curb our reliance on fossil fuels: one strong possibility is that we may render the planet “unfit for human life.” He believes, like Deffeyes, that the earth had only about 2 trillion barrels of crude oil to begin with, and that we’ve already found and consumed about half of it, so we are essentially at the tipping point, or the Hubbert’s Peak. We can perhaps save ourselves by switching to an array of alternative energy sources, including nuclear energy, solar power, and hydrogen. But Goodstein feels that we’d better start soon, as there is not much time left for the enormous economic and social dislocations sure to come, and we’ll need the remaining crude oil more for petrochemicals than for fuel: “Ninety percent of the organic chemicals we use—pharmaceuticals, agricultural chemicals, plastics—are made from petroleum,” he states. Goodstein bluntly emphasizes the scientific limitations on the Optimists’ possible solutions to the world’s looming energy crisis: “What about the possibility that a huge new discovery of conventional oil will put off the problem for the foreseeable future? Better to believe in the tooth fairy,” he says. Goodstein concludes that—essentially—the only wiggle room left for us lies with politics, not science: “The real challenge—the challenge we would set for ourselves if we had courageous, visionary leadership—would be to kick the fossil-fuel habit altogether as soon as possible.” But, he goes on to observe, “unfortunately, our present national and international leadership is reluctant even to acknowledge that there is a problem.”

More comprehensive than the two other scientific works, the unambiguously titled The End of Oil focuses on the broad implications of what Roberts describes as an energy system that is already falling apart, and how America could, with a minimum of upheaval, bridge a decades-long transformational gap between today’s fossil fuel-based society and one based on other sources of energy. That would involve real changes—political, social, and economic. But Roberts sketches a pathway out of the crude-oil dead end that involves, first, an increased reliance on more-plentiful natural gas (its Hubbert’s Peak won’t occur until years after that of crude oil), both for synthetic fuels and for making hydrogen for the fuel cells that will ultimately power most vehicles. He sees important roles for a wide spectrum of energy sources, including renewables like wind power for generating electricity. But Roberts is not sanguine about the United States having the political will to address the energy crisis: “The sheer magnitude and complexity and unpredictability of the task at hand give us little choice but to start transforming our energy system now.” And if we don’t do so?

“Each year that we fail to commit to serious energy research and development or fail to begin slowing the growth of energy demand through fuel efficiency...is another year in which our already unstable energy economy moves so much closer to the point of no return.”

Optimists take major comfort in some of the projections issued by the U.S. government. Probably the most authoritative statement of oilsupply optimism comes from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Energy Information Administration, or EIA (DOE’s internal fossil-fuel research unit). In 2000 EIA ran a series of projections on when the oil-production peak is most likely to occur. It came up with 12 scenarios pegging the peak at somewhere between the years 2021 and 2112—nearly a 100-year time span. It’s a complex forecast with many variables and some serious unknowns (how do you accurately forecast quantities of oil as yet undiscovered?), but EIA’s analysis concludes that “world conventional oil production may increase two decades or more [from this year] before it begins to decline.” That forecast—the leading view of the Optimists—thus pegs the fateful turning point in our energy-dependent civilization at somewhere in the 2020s, or at least one generation hence. In other words, this is a huge potential January 2005 www.plentymag.com

problem, but for people accustomed to thinking in terms of four-year electoral cycles or corporate quarterly profit-and-loss statements, it’s not something they—or any other U.S. citizens—really need to worry about now, or even in the next fiscal year.

Optimists inside and outside the government believe that market forces will spur the technological improvements that will help us find and extract additional oil, making other sources profitable—among them, the tar sands of Alberta, the heavy oil in Venezuela, the oil shales of Colorado and other Western states, and even the conversion of corn to methanol. Loren Beard, an energy analyst with DaimlerChrysler, believes that the crude-oil peak will occur sometime beyond 2050, and that long before then, market forces will make nonconventional fuels a major factor: “When crude goes to 40 to 50 dollars a barrel, other fuels become competitive. E85, or 85 percent ethanol, becomes competitive then. And biomass fuels become competitive in that price range.” And again, depending on market prices, there are also possibilities of converting natural gas into a liquid fuel widely suitable for motor transport uses.

Other Optimists talk about larger untouched oil sources: “There’s a lot of oil that we know about, both in identified reserves and in areas we think have reasonable prospects,” says Ed Porter, an analyst at API. “Right now we have about one trillion barrels of reserves—plus another trillion in estimated oil.” They also talk about huge, untouched reserves in Russia, deep in the Gulf of Mexico, in the Caspian Sea region, and, of course, about the billions of barrels of oil said to be lurking in Iraq. It is noteworthy, however, that the estimates of oil reserves in Iraq vary even more wildly than they do for most countries—somewhere between 78 billion barrels (according to a conservative and scientific assessment by the USGS) and 112 billion barrels (according to DOE, which relies on unsupported compilations

by Oil and Gas Journal), and on up to guesses that peg Iraq’s reserves above those of Russia and of Saudi Arabia.

But many of the estimates of oil yet to be found are very soft numbers. And what if the Pessimists are right? Or more nearly right than the Optimists? Then what?

It’s a two-part question. What will the big players—the government, the oil companies, the other energy suppliers, and the automakers—do? And, secondly, what, if anything, can you do?

The current U.S. government does have an energy policy, articulated in a 170-page report in May of 2001, by a controversial task force that was convened by Vice President Cheney (its makeup is a secret, and as of yet the courts have not required full disclosure of its records). But whatever “special interests” contributed to the report, it’s no secret that the policy and recommendations are heavily weighted toward enhancing our dependence on fossil fuels, oil, natural gas, and coal, with scant attention to renewables and alternative fuels. And for its part, Congress has shown little interest in passing comprehensive energy legislation or funding energy research. As for conservation measures, the Senate agreed in 2002 to freeze the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards for light trucks (that’s SUVs to you, and about 45 percent of the total U.S. vehicle fleet) at 20.7 mpg, instead of the 27.5 mpg mandated for passenger cars. That the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (part of the Department of Transportation) could recommend only a 1.5 mpg increase in CAFE standards by 2007 suggests strongly where the current administration’s energy priorities are.

WHAT ARE THE ALTERNATIVES? The world’s major energy companies are in the business of finding crude oil and natural gas and bringing them to the world markets at a profit, so they are primarily focused on that task. Knowing that the great oil-field finds are surely in the past, and that only small fields 66 | P L E N T Y

can be found (and that new oil reserves are being discovered at only a fraction of the rate at which we are burning the oil), these companies are concentrating on improving technologies that will allow them to extract more than the usual 30 percent or so of the oil that is actually surfaced from the underground fields. One API economist says, “We don’t see any evidence of problems with long-term supplies. After all, both production and reserves have been going up pretty steadily for 150 years.” And if crude-oil supplies begin to dry up? Energy companies are looking to the exploitation of nonconventional sources of oil, like the tar sands of Alberta, which, according to the Canadian government, contain some 100 billion barrels of reserves, to heavy oils elsewhere in the Americas, to liquefied natural gas, or even to speculative sources of energy like methane hydrates, supposedly to be found in large quantities in the deep oceans. But Toyota’s pessimistic Reinert counters that the “oil guys are all happy talk about oil getting back down to 22 dollars a barrel.

But you notice that even with these high prices, we don’t seem to be able to build inventories.”

Energy-company Web sites frequently mention research into noncrude-oil sources, and, presumably, when fuel prices climb high enough, the companies will turn to such sources. BP, for one, recently announced plans to open a small network of hydrogen-fueling stations in California, Florida, and Michigan, coordinated with Ford Motor’s plan to field a test fleet of some 30 hydrogen-hybrid (that is, a small gasoline engine essentially charging and aiding a 67-horsepower electric motor) Focus sedans in late 2004, mostly for municipal government use; it’s an experimental program funded by DOE. World automakers, often vilified for their reliance on big, fuelthirsty SUVs (straight economics: there is more profit to be made in a luxurious high-priced vehicle than in a small, light, efficient vehicle), are clearly capable of building more-fuel-efficient cars and trucks, and have already embarked on manufacturing hybrids and prototype alternative-fuel vehicles. Toyota may be furthest along in the marketplace with its Prius. This slick, competitively priced hybrid performs in a seamless manner and is at least comparable with conventional gas-engine family sedans, according to a recent Consumer Reports assessment—while getting 44 mpg overall, with near-zero emissions. A Washington Post story published in mid-May found that many Toyota dealers now have waiting lists for the popular hybrid.

And conversely, SUV customers may already be voting with their checkbooks: Demand for Hummers (9.6 mpg) is down 25 percent from last year, and Cadillac is looking at a significant backlog of unsold Escalades (14 mpg).

DaimlerChrysler will soon market its first hybrid in the United States, a Ram pickup truck with a diesel-electric combination power train, to be followed by a Jeep Liberty hybrid. A fleet of some 350 diesel-electric, hybrid-powered buses is now under construction.

Offering a 70 percent increase in mileage over conventional diesels, these will begin go into service in some American cities this fall. On the Mercedes side of the company is a test fleet of some 30 fuel cellpowered municipal buses in service in Madrid, and the company has begun testing a fleet of delivery vehicles in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where the EPA has set up a test hydrogen-fueling station.

DaimlerChrysler’s Beard says the company is conducting research on many alternative fuels “now, in order to be ready for a non-gasoline future.” He believes fuel cells “are going to be important, but for cars they are not yet economically viable and are still just one step beyond research projects.”

Perhaps seeking the best of both worlds, Ford will introduce a small (3,700-pound) hybrid SUV, the Escape, in the upcoming model year. Its power train consists of a 133-horsepower, four-cylinder gasoline engine plus a 94-horsepower AC electric motor. No word yet on January 2005 www.plentymag.com

its projected gas mileage. Other Ford hybrids are in development.

GM appears to be concentrating on what it calls a “hydrogen future,” embodied currently in a drivable prototype called the Hywire.

It’s a passenger vehicle with a hydrogen-fed fuel cell that gets an equivalent to some 41 mpg, with an 80-mile range. While developing the hydrogen fuel cells, GM is fielding some heavy hybrids, including a fleet of more than 200 dieselelectric hybrid buses in Washington State, with hybrid pickup trucks soon to come to market.

Automakers are proceeding on the assumption that personal transportation is a given in the United States and in other countries around the world. And if the cars can’t burn gasoline, the industry is committed to finding other methods of making them go. Electrics were long considered a possibility, but when Honda and General Motors tested some refined models, they hit a technological and battery-weight “wall,” and development stopped. Hydrogen has attractive properties as a fuel but drawbacks as well. It can be manufactured from a wide range of “feed stocks,” including natural gas and coal, but the transport and, especially, the storage of hydrogen remain problematic. Toyota’s Reinert says, “We’ve got no real way to store hydrogen in the car. If you compress it and store it in a 10,000psi tank, it takes a half hour to fuel it up. It’s got a range of 150 miles between fueling, and the tank is so large there is no luggage room.

We’re all still working on it, but absent a breakthrough on hydrogen storage, hybrids still look most promising in the short run.”

consensus that given the post-9/11 geopolitical climate, we are very likely to experience serious interruptions of our oil supply. “All it will take is an attack on a major refinery or the sinking of some oil tankers,” says Reinert, “and crude could go to 55 to 60 dollars a barrel. And we’ll be back to lines at the gas stations.”

API’s Porter agrees: “I think there is cause for alarm,” he says, “because we are not developing the worldwide capacity to keep pace with demand. Always in the past we had a huge excess capacity in the Middle East that allowed us to weather a lot of upheavals. But we don’t have that cushion anymore. We don’t have the capability to weather an interruption of Persian Gulf oil for a long stretch—several months or more.”

Any such interruptions would amount to a dress rehearsal for the coming era of a declining world oil supply.

So, back to that milk run you made in your Trailblazer, the one where you burned a gallon of gas to get a gallon of milk, and consider some other scenarios. You stop at your local Exxon/Mobil station and the price of gasoline has just topped $7 a gallon. This gets your attention. At that price, filling the tank of your big Chevy is going to relieve you of $140. That will carry you for 174 miles, at a rough, rude cost of more than $1 a mile. You have a vision of your Trailblazer burning up greenbacks, one every time the odometer clicks. You start thinking of alternatives: Maybe you bunch up the shopping trips. Maybe you change your plans for that weekend at a country inn 150 miles away. Maybe you start thinking about trading in the Trailblazer for something a little smaller and more fuel-efficient.

Or another scenario: You stop at your local Exxon/Mobil station and find that it’s closed. Nobody home. No gas is available today at $2 a gallon or at $7 a gallon or at $20 a gallon. It seems there were terrorist attacks in the Middle East, with pipelines blown up and a few tankers sunk in the Persian Gulf, blocking the shipping lanes. So your motor-fuel supply just got “interrupted.” A note taped to pump number one says that the station manager hopes to have more gas in ten days. You don’t want to contemplate what the lines will be like in ten days. You start thinking about a sleeping bag and a thermos of coffee.

You have only about seven gallons left in the Chevy, or about 61 miles worth, and some quick calculations suggest that’s not enough for driving around to hunt for a gas station that might have fuel for sale. You start thinking about just the essential trips in the days ahead: getting to work, getting the kids to school, a couple of well-planned shopping runs. That’s about it. Suddenly the golf course that’s 12 or 15 miles from your house may as well be in the south of France. Then you start thinking about the impact on the companies, the truckers, who supply the convenience store and all the other stores. And what’s going to happen to the price of milk? How will the kids get to school? How are you going to get to work? How much diesel fuel does your volunteer fire department have on hand? How much heating oil do you have in the big tank in the basement? And, for the first time, you get that steely, breathless feeling inside that this one is serious, that this time—and from now on—the savored, comfy routines of your life are going to change, a lot, whether you like it or not.

Welcome to our future. ■

While we cannot invent more crude oil to find, or count on some miracle breakthrough energy source, we can, through conservation, push the day of reckoning into the future

FACING FUTURE SHOCK You, as an individual consumer of cheap oil-energy products, probably cannot solve this problem at the macro level. Still, it is useful, considering the Optimist stance of the Bush administration and the general state of denial in Congress, to remember that you can vote for candidates who are willing to face the uncomfortable facts of impending energy crises.

In your own life, you can conserve energy right now and plan for a future of steadily rising energy costs. Reduce energy use with more efficient appliances, more home insulation, more-thoughtful travel.

Walk, buy a bicycle, sell your gas-gulping SUV now (and avoid the rush to unload them when gas prices spike to more than $5 a gallon).

Efficient alternatives, like the Toyota Prius, which gets more than 50 miles per gallon on the highway, are readily available at prices competitive with conventional family sedans.

If such small-scale, personal conservation measures seem futile, bear in mind the recent energy crisis in California, when Vice President Dick Cheney opined that “conservation may be a sign of personal virtue, but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound comprehensive energy policy,” a quote that was widely reported as Cheney’s “conservation is for sissies” agenda. The thing to bear in mind is that Cheney proved to be exactly wrong. Individual conservation decisions rapidly reduced the demand for energy in California statewide by about 10 percent. The lesson is that while we cannot invent more crude oil to find, or count on some miracle, breakthrough energy source, we can, through conservation, help push that day of oil reckoning farther into the future. That will help us to buy the time we need to smooth the transition to an economy based on multiple, non-crude-oil sources of energy. And it is good practice for us all during these parlous times. While there are major disagreements about the world’s crude-oil supplies and when they will peak, there is 68 | P L E N T Y

Michael W. Robbins is the former editor in chief of Audubon magazine and a contributing editor of Plenty.

January 2005 www.plentymag.com

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More than a mile below the ocean’s surface, deprived of light and buffeted by cyclic lava flows, a strange ecosystem punctuates long stretches of utter stillness.

SOUNDING THE

DEPTHS

BY KATHERINE MILLETT

PETER BATSON/EXPLORETHEABYSS.COM

T

he round hatch closed, and we were sealed inside the submarine. Screeching hydraulic lifts raised us from the stern of the ship Atlantis and swung us over the Pacific Ocean. I sat cramped and cross-legged on a padded ledge and craned to look through my only window, a five-inch circle by my right knee. For the next seven hours, I would share the compact sphere and a tank of oxygen with Stephane Hourdez, a French biologist, and Pat Hickey, the curly-haired chief pilot and expedition leader of the Alvin, as the sub is known.

Soon we would enter a lightless realm a mile and a half deep, where tectonic plates slide apart and volcanoes erupt to make the earth’s new crust. Our mission was to find animals around hydrothermal vents, the undersea geysers that support life. There, bizarre creatures cling to lava rocks and crawl on fragile chimneys. They make long tubes and live inside them, tremble when the earth quakes, and sizzle to death under cyclic lava flows. Some have no eyes; others lack mouths. No place on earth is more remote.

The 17-ton sub paused briefly before slipping beneath the ocean’s skin. Bubbles surrounded my window, a flipper flashed by, and a masked face peered in at me. Two swimmers were tightening ropes on the sample basket and checking the sub’s mechanical arms. At the end of the day, Stephane warned me, I might get mooned. Such are the honors extended to first-time divers.

I’d been invited by chief scientist Janet Voight, a curator at the Field Museum in Chicago, to join the 27-day cruise aboard the Atlantis as an observer and a journalist. Voight specializes in octopuses—not octopi, she says—the predators at the top of the food chain of the vent community. Some people look to the abyss for metals or pharmaceuticals, but biologists like Janet and Stephane seek animals.

The cruise was funded by the National Science Foundation’s Biotic Surveys and Inventories program to collect specimens and make them available for international research. Vent communities were discovered relatively recently, near the Galápagos Islands in 1977. Yet this was eight years after a person had walked on the moon. We know more about Mars and the lunar landscape than we do about our own deep oceans, and there simply aren’t enough specimens on dry land to support scientists’ burgeoning interest in studying them.

Geologists had joined the cruise to study vent chemistry and to add to the map of the world. Some stayed up all night bouncing sonar beams to the ocean floor from the hull of the ship and converting returned signals into contour maps. Two dove to a previously unexplored site where 350 earthquakes had been recorded in a single day.

I suspected they loved the thrill of the risk, but they solemnly swore they wanted only to find new vents. (They didn’t.)

Pat held a transmitter near his mouth and talked to the launch controller. “Coordinates set to go. Oxygen on. Scrubbers on.”

“You’re free to dive when the swimmers are clear,” said a voice.

“Okay,” Pat answered. “Bye. See you.”

The swimmers disappeared and left us to our solitude.

We began to descend in the open ocean, 1,300 miles west of the Panama Canal, 675 miles north of the equator. Below us lay the East Pacific Rise, part of a submerged mountain range that winds through the Pacific Ocean, from British Columbia down the west coasts of North, Central, and South America. The ridge continues across the Indian Ocean by Antarctica, up the other side of the globe through the Atlantic Ocean, past Africa and Europe, all the way to Iceland. At 40,000 miles, it is the longest natural feature on Earth. Yet it didn’t even show up in my atlas at home. My map showed blue—nothing but blue—for the oceans.

www.plentymag.com January 2005

We fell slowly through olive-green water flecked with algae. An occasional jellyfish beat its way upward, flexing its gelatinous body.

The water darkened to blue green, then navy blue. I could hear nothing but the steady “plink, plink” of sonar signals emanating from the sub, as though a distant elf were tapping rocks with a metal hammer.

We were dropping 30 meters per minute, on average, but I felt no motion at all. Even Pat, a veteran of more than 500 dives, said he felt nothing. I sat on the starboard side, with Pat to my left and Stephane across the hull, on a ledge like mine. When I leaned forward to look through my window, Pat told me to get out of his way. I had been warned about his moodiness. He scowled at his clipboard, tested the joystick control, and flipped through rows of toggle switches. The atmosphere of a sterile cockpit prevailed.

At 100 meters, our windows were completely dark. I had been waiting for this moment—worrying about it, actually. During the weeks before the dive, I had pictured myself trapped in the little vehicle, suspended in water, poking around in a void. The only warmth would be the diminutive beam of light pointing the sub’s way into darkness—spooky, eerie, and ominous.

I knew I wouldn’t feel claustrophobic, as I had been in small spaces before without panic. And I had faith in Pat and the Alvin, a 40-year-old workhorse that had made 3,937 dives before mine and, to the best of my knowledge, had brought everyone back alive. I didn’t expect the sub to get stuck on the bottom, but if it did—oh, my God—the loneliness. Our oxygen would last 72 hours. Would we share life stories, or agree to remain strangers?

In any event, we could forget about a proper burial. If the Navy decided not to recover its sub, our bodies could remain intact for a restless forever. We could be like the bologna sandwich, a famous artifact of the Alvin’s history.

In 1968 the sub unexpectedly slid off its host ship in deep water near home, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. All three passengers escaped, but the sub spent ten months on the ocean floor with its hatch open. Eventually another sub caught it by fishing with a T-bar, and the Alvin was towed back to Woods Hole. While inspecting the vessel for damage, the staff found the sandwich. An engineer took a bite. It was soggy and salty, he said, but it tasted pretty good. The sandwich had survived the ten months underwater, and the engineer survived the bite.

Stephane, Pat, and I might lack some of the chemical advantages of white bread and bologna, but we could retain our recognizable forms and facial expressions for a long time. It was a gruesome prospect. The idea especially offended Stephane, whose French aesthetics rebelled at the very concept of a bologna sandwich.

“In the French sub Nautile,” he said, his low voice resonating in the metal ball like an announcer’s on FM radio, “we have always a first course, then a warm dish for a second. In the early years, there was a bottle of wine. Dessert—just something simple,” he concluded, with a pout and a dismissive shrug.

At 440 meters, the temperature cooled suddenly. We had reached the thermocline, where warm water meets cold. Stephane pulled on sweatpants, I put on a wool sweater, and Pat, comfortable in his shorts and T-shirt, slid a Patty Larkin CD into the player. The sound of music warmed us more than the extra clothes.

At 700 meters, we reached the “level of eternal darkness,” as William Beebe called it in his 1934 book, Half Mile Down. We had passed the ultimate point of light penetration and entered the world beyond photosynthesis. From here on, any living thing we saw would be an animal.

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Where I had expected to see a jumble of rocks—what French rock climbers call a “chaos”—I found a fully featured landscape. yellow. I was surprised they had eyes at all. Like cats and rabbits, some crustaceans have rings of mirroring tissue in their eyes to increase sensitivity to light, as I later learned from scientist Tamara Frank. She thinks the sub’s lights permanently blind some deep-sea animals, based on her observations of disrupted ocular tissues. She hopes to test this hypothesis further by studying animals trapped in darkness. The shrimps didn’t seem to react to our lights, though. They stood still until they sensed current from the sub, then rose in graceful arcs, their legs scurrying upward, pedaling as if to do back flips.

Pat dropped half of our weights—500 pounds of iron bricks. I imagined them clanking together, but all I heard were the plinks of sonar and the vocals of Patty Larkin. The iron would slowly rust away, and I wondered how its oxidation would affect the chemistry of the place. Higher in the ocean, tiny amounts of iron significantly increase photosynthesis by algae. Below the photic zone, no one quite knows what rusting weights do.

We lifted off. Out of the darkness, defying the boundless space, the sub’s lights created a corridor and we headed down it.

“I’m trying to get some velocity out of this pig,” Pat said, half joking. The Alvin motored along at a poky 1.4 knots over convex rocks.

Black and glassy, they gave a cobblestone aspect to our path. Some looked like lounging walruses, others like tortoise shells. Many were broken—cracked black eggs. The instant I realized they were hollow, the drama of the mid-ocean ridge became real to me.

These shiny, round rocks were new, spewed from a volcano only weeks or months before our arrival. The lava “pillows” and the flat “sheets” next to them had formed almost as fast as we moved past them. (Odd that geologists use bedding terms to describe the most restless phenomena on Earth.) As geochemist Robert “Z” Zierenberg explained to me later, magma erupted here in red-and-orange splendor, superheated to 2,200 degrees (1,200 degrees Celsius), then fell back on the ridge like a pile of honey. It oozed downhill and swelled into beads at its edges. Within a few seconds, the outer surface of each bead hardened in the near-freezing seawater. But more honey pushed from behind. The flow of lava broke through the end of each shell and left it hollow to make another pillow, and another.

Where I had expected to see a jumble of rocks—what French rock climbers call a “chaos”—I found a fully featured landscape. We passed a steep hill covered with scree, like a rock-strewn summit in the Colorado Rockies. Then we entered a winding canyon reminiscent of southern Utah, its walls about three stories high. Gloomy waters enveloped freestanding towers of igneous rock.

Moving toward a murky pattern of tall forms, we arrived at a cluster of sulfide chimneys. They seemed too thin and fragile to stand.

The columns, 12 to 18 feet high, are called black smokers because hot fluid densely mixed with particles of sulfide metals (like iron, manganese, copper, and gold) shoots from their tops. The chimneys form when a vent bursts through the earth’s crust and the heated mixture meets cold seawater, at which point minerals at the periphery of the fluid column precipitate and solidify.

Pat sidled up to a chimney, raised one of the Alvin’s arms, and flexed January 2005 www.plentymag.com

PETER BATSON/EXPLORETHEABYSS.COM

So I was startled to see specks of light appear. Tiny copepods and other bits of plankton spun in the water and glimmered. Jellyfish hung in eerie suspension, their bodies tinted green and orange. In the thick of it, Pat told me to close my eyes. He turned on the sub’s lights for a minute, then turned them off and invited me to look. The effect was spectacular. A light show stretched before me, layer beyond layer of phosphorescent radiance extending deeper and deeper into the void, as resplendent as a galaxy but far more intimate.

“Amazing!” was all I could say. I recalled Beebe laughing at himself for the “unproductive ‘Oh’s and Ah’s’” of his first submarine dives, but I hope I never lose my giddy sense of wonder about that day. At 1,700 meters the bioluminescence dimmed, and we settled into thoughtful silence.

A half hour later, Pat clicked on the transmitter and announced, “Ninety-five meters,” his voice cool with confidence. He set the controls for landing and switched on the sub’s lights again. I struggled to see the bottom, but it was hidden by turbid water. Suddenly a pattern of circles popped into relief, like a carpet of bubble wrap. The ground moved steadily toward us and surrounded us in a sparkling cloud.

The sub stopped at 2,630 meters, 1.6 miles below the surface.

Bacterial debris hung in the water like suspended snow. I felt a heavy, enveloping stillness. The pressure squeezing the sub was 3,800 pounds per square inch. My ears didn’t pop, nor did my lungs labor, but my breathing and circulation seemed to have slowed to match the languid pace of the abyss. Had I sat in a low-pressure environment and watched images of what I saw out my window, I would not have felt the myriad, subtle effects of compression, the weight of an enormous water column bearing down on our capsule and our surroundings.

A landscape of black rocks stretched ahead. Two red shrimps stood in a crevice. Their long antennae waved slowly, and their eyes shone

A CLOSE-UP (opposite page) of the eye and mouth of a deep-sea lizardfish (Bathysaurus mollis). The barbed teeth hold its prey in place until it can be swallowed.

The vent bristleworm, or polynoid, (this page), is about an inch long, and lives among its relatives, the larger tube worms.

its metal claw to take a sample. I stared at the iconic image: machine meets rock. When the claw closed, a section of the chimney disintegrated into a billowing cloud of gray dust. The tower’s conical turret was gone. Black fluid rose through the newly opened wound, a gray-andwhite ring lined with glittering metal crystals. We had trespassed; scientists would study the sample; a different chimney would form.

Our journey continued along the canyon, and the ground resumed its cobblestone pattern. Soon, signs of life appeared as squiggles on rocks, the white tubes of Serpulid worms. Crabs and squat lobsters came next. Their shells are chalky white, pigment having lost its relevance during their evolutionary descent through the abyss. Then my view grew fuzzy. Shimmering water rose by my window. We had reached a colonized vent.

As Pat turned the sub, I saw one of the largest pillars of tube worms currently known to exist on the East Pacific Rise. Thousands of curving, waving forms covered a column of rock as thick as a redwood tree, beckoning us with their blood-red plumes. Sliding into and out of white chitin tubes, they were weird and beautiful, disturbingly sexual.

Pat finessed the joystick to raise the sub, and their plumes retracted as we passed. An eyeless crab lumbered up a series of papery tubes like an old man climbing stairs.

So these were the giant tubeworms, Riftia pachyptila. They embrace the ultimate alternative lifestyle. If life exists on Mars or the Europa moon of Jupiter, it may resemble these creatures, which survive with no sunlight and almost no oxygen. Fossils found in a copper mine show them to be at least 95 million years old. Tubeworms don’t eat. They don’t have mouths. And yet, somehow, they acquire bacteria to live with symbiotically.

The heroes of this story are the bacteria. Forget photosynthesis; this is chemosynthesis. As chlorophyll metabolizes sunlight for plants, these microbes use energy from hydrogen sulfide to turn water and carbon dioxide into oxygen and organic carbon. For them, hydrogen sulfide is the stuff of life. For us, it’s an ingredient in lethal injections.

One of Stephane’s areas of research is the hemoglobin that makes hydrogen sulfide work as tubeworm food. A tubeworm is red because it is full of a fancy hemoglobin that binds sulfides separately from oxygen. Its circulatory system carries sulfides to the bacteria lodged in the trophosome and delivers oxygen to the tubeworm proper. All the tubeworm has to do is to hold its red plume in the mixing zone, where vent fluid meets seawater, soaking up sulfides before they oxidize. Chemicals in its body sort nourishment from poison, just as proteins in the bodies of the other vent animals protect them from heavy metal-poisoning. No wonder pharmaceutical companies are interested in these animals. While Pat picked up specimens and secured them www.plentymag.com January 2005

in boxes on the front of the sub, I stared out my window. Fifty squat lobsters clung to a flat rock, absolutely motionless. In the ten minutes I spent studying them, not one of their 500 appendages moved. As a restless human, I had trouble understanding this. More than anything else I saw or felt, their stillness informed my sense of “otherness.”

Then we met the octopus. It was a Vulcanoctopus hydrothermalis, the only octopod species known to be unique to vents. Near this very site in 1998, Homo sapiens collected Vulcanoctopus hydrothermalis for the first time. It seemed to contemplate us as it arranged itself on open ground, spreading its pale arms gracefully around the white balloon of its body, about 24 inches from extremity to extremity. When I saw the friendly ghost face and the big black eyes, I understood why some scientists call it the puppy of the deep. But an octopus is a fierce predator. It nabs smaller animals in the webs between its arms, chemically immobilizes them, and chomps on them with its teeth and beak.

“Come here, little octopus,” Pat cooed. He moved toward it with the suction tube poised for capture. As Pat teased two of its arms into the tube, the octopus felt the threat and pulled away. Closing like an umbrella, it rose in the water and glided like a bulb trailing ribbons, dancing its way into an alcove with Pat and the Alvin close behind.

Deftly feeling along the rocky surface, it tucked itself under a ledge.

Pat reached for the tips of a few exposed arms, but he was too late. The octopus prevailed.

Pat took it well. His brown eyes flashed amusement, and he said it was time to surface. We had been on the bottom for more than five hours; the basket was full. He dropped the remaining weights and shed some water ballast, and we rose drowsily through the black, blue, and green layers of ocean. Stephane dozed; Patty sang; I pondered. It took us a little more than an hour to reach the surface. We were met by the swimmers, hitched to the A-frame, and hoisted aboard the Atlantis. I did not get mooned; all of us made it through the voyage without having to use the sub’s pee bottles; and I was christened with the buckets of ice water that typically initiate first-time divers.

We brought back an array of specimens for the Field Museum’s collection, including several species never before described. There were scale worms for Stephane; octopuses for Janet; pieces of basalt and metal sulfides for Z; fluid samples, crustaceans, and temperature readings for the other scientists; and for me, a new sense of the world.

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y few hours in the Alvin took me to awe-inspiring depths, where I met the unimaginable and witnessed a profound connection between life and stone. Animals have been living in deep-ocean communities on the energy from sulfides for eons, and yet we learned of their existence only a generation ago. We know so much less than we think we do.

It troubled me to introduce lights and weights into that environment, not knowing their impact, yet it also felt like hubris to worry about species that routinely survive volcanic eruptions. The East Pacific Rise, where new crust forms faster than anywhere else on Earth, is a landscape shaped by calamity. Sudden birth and sudden death punctuate long stretches of utter stillness.

I emerged from the ocean floor with a fatalistic sense of optimism.

I know now that life exists beyond us, without us, despite us. Powerful as we are, we are no match for the metals and microbes that combine in vent fluid. Those basic bits of life and earth will endure to remake the world again and again. ■ Katherine Millett, a contributing editor of Plenty, has climbed the Grand Teton, explored canyons in Utah, skied in east Greenland, and gotten lost in her own neighborhood.

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What’s Love Got to Do with It? Quite a bit these days.

But a brief history of marriage shows that in times past it was seldom the deciding factor for saying “I do.”

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BY E. J. GRAFF

ike almost everyone else’s, my family history is filled with strange and scandalous marriage stories. On my mother’s side, my grandparents, Rebecca and Al, married impulsively during the Depression; afraid to deprive their families of their respective wages, they told no one for months. On my father’s side, my grandfather, Joe, divorced his first wife and married my grandmother; her WASP/Irish family (a shocking combo in the late 19th century) was unhappy about her marriage to a divorced Jew. Then, after she killed herself, Joe remarried his first wife. His older son, my uncle, married a black woman at a time when mixed-race marriage was illegal in 13 states.

Joe’s younger son, my father, met my mother and raced down the aisle just minutes after their college graduation, like so many during the bizarre 1950s marriage madness—and then, again like so many of their generation, raced right back out of marriage during the 1970s.

Doesn’t it all sound like a bad joke? Secret marriages for love.

Marriage without parental permission. Divorce and remarriage, while the first spouse was still alive. Mixed marriage. Interracial marriage.

All these have been said, over the millennia, to be against the very definition of marriage, made in defiance of the word of God, portents of civilization’s end.

And then there’s the family punch line: me. In 1991 I added the flourish to this condensed history of broken marital taboos. In a small living-room ceremony, surrounded by family and friends, I pledged myself to another woman, a woman I still adore.

The power of our public vows shocked me. What had we done?

Had we simply had a ceremony—or had we gotten married? Was our bond in any way linked with the institution that had so profoundly marked my mother, my grandmothers, my great-grandmothers? I wasn’t at all sure. I had decided at age ten that I wouldn’t follow my mother into house-bondage, rejecting marriage long before it rejected me. And so I was taken aback to realize that, like my parents and grandparents, I too was one with my era, part of a worldwide samesex marriage movement now roiling every developed nation.

That sounds like a big claim. But it’s true: Same-sex marriage is imminent in every developed nation, although you wouldn’t know it from some of the end-of-the-world rhetoric heard in America. Three countries—the Netherlands, Belgium, and Canada—offer same-sex couples full civil-marriage rights. Spain, Sweden, South Africa, and

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Taiwan are expected to do so within the next two years; the rest of the Scandinavian countries won’t take long to follow. Germany, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and South Africa either already do or are about to offer lesbian and gay-male couples almost every marriage obligation and recognition except the M-word. Australia, New Zealand, Hungary, Israel, Portugal, France, 11 out of the 17 Spanish provinces, Vermont, California, New Jersey, two Argentinean provinces and another two in Brazil offer roughly half of the legal obligations, recognitions, rights, and responsibilities of full marriage, under such alt-names as “civil unions” or “pactes civils de solidarité.”

The same-sex marriage debate has even been hitting the newspapers in such unlikely locales as the Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Italy, Poland, and Slovenia.

To many, this issue seems to have come out of nowhere, an abrupt and godless attempt to rewrite the meaning of marriage. I confess that I understand that point of view. All the rest of my family’s broken marriage taboos—marrying so far out of the tribe that you’re considered dead; marrying more than one living spouse; marrying in defiance of your parents—may have been against the law at different times in history, but at least they have all been debated for millennia. That’s not so for same-sex marriage, which is a historically new proposal.

So how did we get here? Why, for the first time in Western history, are we debating whether marriage might mean not just Boy+Girl=Babies but also Girl+Girl=Love? The answer to that question is hidden, like a Russian nesting doll, inside a larger—and historically quite contentious—question: What, exactly, is marriage for?

Before going any further, let’s tackle head-on the big lie of the family values debates: the idea that marriage has been a solid, revered, immutable, monogamous thing for 6,000 years. It just isn’t so. Marriage has always been hot political territory, constantly redefined as societies change. All eras and cultures—and even some cultures or classes living side by side—have rewritten the rules of marriage to fit their beliefs about what marriage is for.

A few “Ripley’s Believe It or Not” facts might give you an idea of how wild the historical ride of marriage has been. Did you know, for instance, that Abraham and Sarah (that Judeo-Christian founding couple) were half siblings, sharing a father? That only one-third of Romans, the upper class, had the right to marry legally (in connubium), while everyone else lived together beyond the notice of the law January 2005 www.plentymag.com

“THE BUNNY HOP,” ACRYLIC AND COLLAGE ON PAPER, 2002 BY BARBARA WESTMAN.

(in conternubium)? That under Jewish law in some eras and regions, if a man’s wife remained childless after ten years, he was required to marry again—with or without divorcing the first? That Christianity, for its first 500 or so years, ignored marriage and didn’t declare it a sacrament until 1215? That the contemporary state of Israel has no civil marriage at all, leaving the word to the religious authorities— which means that atheist or inter-religious couples must travel abroad to tie the knot?

Each of those marriage rules makes sense if you understand the social purpose it’s trying to enforce. For instance, early Hebrews believed marriage was for consolidating and perpetuating the tribe, and so were much stricter about not marrying out than they were about not marrying in. For Abraham and Sarah, growing up in a tribal society meant that siblings were created by sharing a womb, and therefore a childhood tent; sharing a father, but not a mother, was more like having a cousin than a half sib.

Or take the parsimonious marriage law of the Romans. They believed marriage was for creating dynastic alliances and passing on property. So why would they bother regulating or registering the dalliances of slaves, servants, soldiers, and minor merchants? www.plentymag.com December 2004

Meanwhile, early Christianity—when it was still a ragtag utopian sect, before it joined up with Roman power—was dedicated to holy celibacy. While awaiting Jesus’ imminent return, early Christians were perfectly willing to let Caesar regulate marriage, considering it a slightly dirty and secular institution, sullied by property and power.

Several big shifts in the history of marriage have led to today’s debate about whether marriage might be expanded to include samesex couples. The first, strangely enough, was when Christianity became a state religion. Once it began taking marriage seriously, the Roman Catholic Church completely up-ended the marriage rules. No longer, it insisted, could feudal lords take a first wife, a backup wife, and a chorus of concubines partly for pleasure and partly to guarantee an heir. The Church insisted that marriage meant one wife for life— even if she was infertile. Monogamy without the chance for divorce was a complete redefinition of marriage, so unnatural as to be historically unique—and, to be honest, a theory often honored as much in its breach as in its practice.

But Christianity went further: It insisted that the girl, not just her father, consent to the marriage—out loud. Until I looked into the history of marriage, I always thought it slightly silly that both parties must P L E N T Y | 75

say “I do”; surely they wouldn’t have gone to all the trouble to host a wedding just to say “I don’t.” But once upon a time, the father of the bride literally gave her away: Whether she “did” or “didn’t” wasn’t an issue. Then the Church battled the feudal lords for centuries, insisting that she have a say in her marriage—that without her consent, there was in fact no valid marriage. Those vows spoken aloud are an atavistic reminder of Christianity’s radical shift in the meaning of marriage.

It’s a breathtaking concept, lovely to find in an era during which men traded off their daughters’ wombs like cattle, and sometimes for cattle.

Instead, as the 12th-century theologian Gratian wrote, arguing for the new marriage rules, “Where there is to be union of bodies there ought to be union of spirits.”

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arriage not just for securing heirs and forging alliances but also for lifetime spiritual union: That was the first radical transformation in the meaning of marriage. It’s a concept we still live by today—and one which same-sex couples seek.

But same-sex marriage would have seemed absurd in 1215. Before we could have today’s debate, we needed the second big historical transformation in marriage’s meaning: the death of “traditional” marriage. Traditional marriage, that phrase thrown around so easily on editorial pages these days, should really be used to mean marriage for money. Until capitalism, marriage was the fundamental economic bargain, a contract to exchange either of those two ways of making a living, land or labor. If your families had property, marriage was the way they exchanged it. If you came from the class of butchers, bakers, or candlestick makers, marriage was your complete plan of labor.

The farmer required a farmwife; the fisherman, a fishwife to deliver his goods to market. The German guilds wouldn’t let a journeyman move up to master until he had a wife, the business partner who would feed the apprentices, keep the books, and oversee the maids who cleaned the shop. In Dickensian England, if a jail keeper was widowed, she could only get her contract renewed if she could prove she had a serious marriage prospect; otherwise she was out on the street. Men and women had—by definition—different yet interlocking jobs. Marriage mated their efforts and finances forever after.

Of course the couple cared for each other, unless they irritated each other to death—just as people in our era often care for, or hate, their coworkers. But everyone expected them to talk about the important money matters first, and assumed that afterward they could work out such details as affection, sex, and maybe even love. As one historian put it, “Marriage for love was the dubious luxury of those without property,” that bottom fifth of the population who lived so near starvation they didn’t even have a cook pot and two dresses to write down in the dowry contract. Or as a 17th-century English proverb put it, “Who marrieth for love without money hath good nights and sorry days.”

All of that changed once work left home. Men got shoved out into the cold marketplace, selling their talents as individuals, instead of as family units. Young, single women were sent out to work for weekly wages, instead of spending ten years as domestic servants to build up a dowry. A married woman was no longer the "mistress" who ran the

shop; she was confined inside the house to do the work the hired help had once done: cooking, cleaning, caretaking.

With capitalism, marriage ceased to be the only way to exchange either of those two ways of earning a living, land or labor. Today Westerners are as mobile as phones, making their own decisions about which talents and inclinations to trust. Capitalism pushed marriage through the looking glass: Now we expect people to talk about love first, and money last—maybe at the very end, when they’re getting a divorce.

In the wake of this tectonic shift in the purpose and meaning of marriage, three marriage battles roiled the West. It’s hard to imagine today how vehement was the debate over marriage’s imminent demise during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For a few decades, it seemed that every third magazine article predicted the death of traditional marriage, the end of the family, and, of course, the doom of civilization. “Will the family, that institution which we have long regarded as the unit of civilization, the foundation of the state, survive?” wrote one commentator in 1907. Young men and women were making their own wages—and their own marriages, based on affection and sex rather than labor and babies.

One of the most heated battles was over divorce for incompatibility—a battle that raged through one state legislature after another, and which, year after year, nearly split many Protestant denominations. If marriage was no longer a labor contract but a love contract, what would happen when love was gone? Preachers and pundits thundered with conflicting beliefs. On the one side were the “free lovers,” who maintained that if love was absent, marriage was merely prostitution, scarcely even moral. On the other side were the Christian traditionalists, who insisted that divorce with remarriage was nothing but polygamy, nothing better than legal bed-hopping. Mid-19th-century editor Horace Greeley argued that divorce violated the very definition of marriage (you could read it in the dictionary!)—the joining of two people for life—and suggested that rather than tear up an institution so fundamental to civilization, another be created under a different name. "There may be something better than Marriage,” he wrote, “but nothing is Marriage but a solemn engagement to live together in faith and love till death.”

The next key battle was over legal contraception. Once the entire family was no longer bringing in the sheaves (or mixing the dough, or cleaning the shop), the birth rate began to drop precipitously across the West. Again pundits and preachers wrung their hands with predictions of civilization’s imminent doom. Teddy Roosevelt, among others, raged against “race suicide” and the adulteration of our noble Anglo-Saxon nation, adding that married sex with contraception was “worse than ordinary vice…not a whit better than polygamy.” The battle over birth control was uglier than we remember, nastier than today’s clashes over abortion, lasting for about 75 years and nearly splitting one Protestant denomination after another. In the 1930s, warning that contraception would soon be legalized, a New York archbishop wrote, “Religion shudders at the wild orgy of atheism and immorality the situation forebodes”—clearly predicting the 1950s. But offspring were now a long-term financial investment, instead of an immediate necessity, and so a new philosophy was needed. The free lovers insisted that marriage was justified not only by offspring but

Marriage has always been a battleground, owned and defined first by one group, and then by another.

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January 2005 www.plentymag.com

BARBARA WESTMAN.

also by intimacy, that sex was not only for making babies, but for making love.

The third and longest battle has been over the equality of the sexes. Should married women be able to own property, freed from the control of their husbands? Should they be allowed custody of their children, without male supervision? These were shocking ideas, designed to destroy the fabric of marriage and to “tear society into warring bits,” as one state legislator insisted at the end of the 19th century. Given the power of her own purse, why would any wife remain true to her marriage vows? Why wouldn’t she disobey or run away, refusing her husband’s lawful authority?

That battle lasted until the 1970s, when feminists successfully invented the concept of “domestic violence” and “marital rape”—and married women finally gained legal control not just of their children and pocketbooks but also of their own bodies.

Today a married woman can vote, own property, make independent decisions about whether and where to work (without permission!), and even say no in bed. In return for laying down his legal cudgel, her husband no longer has the obligation to support her financially; he can even stay home and raise the kids.

Marriage law has been fully gender-neutralized—except for the entrance rules.

Now add up those changes. Marriage for love and companionship, instead of marriage as two interlocking jobs. Sex for intimacy, not just for making babies. Two gender-neutral spouses, rather than one who’s lord and master and another who’s a Stepford wife. Lesbians and gay men are following, not leading, the massive transformations that were made between 1850 and 1950 in the philosophy of public marriage.

Under today’s Western marriage philosophy, two women or two men belong.

So what? Isn’t marriage practically extinct? Around the world there’s a mass sit-down strike against the institution, with more and more adults living together without the state’s imprimatur. But don’t believe the hype: that’s less a radical change than a pendulum swing, a return to a traditional, pre-Protestant belief that the couple and their families can arrange and regulate their marriages very well for themselves—except in times of extreme distress and disagreement.

Unfortunately, distress and disagreement have a nasty tendency to crop up in human relations. Marriages are no exception. Our medieval ancestors could decide problems even within informal marriages because everyone in the village knew who belonged to whom, with or without a public vow. But that’s not so easy in our global village, where each of us regularly bumps up against anonymous institutions. www.plentymag.com January 2005

Which is why we still rely on marriage. Today civil marriage is the way society adjudicates an incredible array of disputes over who counts to whom. In times of disease, disaster, divorce, and death, who gets to claim your body, your possessions, your memory? Who gets to oversee your care when you’re hospitalized, or to visit you in jail, or to ship your corpse over state lines, or to claim your pension, or to inscribe your epitaph? When private parties disagree—when a woman dies and her mother and her partner of 15 years fight over who owns the dead woman’s house—society needs some consensus about what’s fair.

And that’s the purpose of civil-marriage law: justice. We know marriage can’t possibly have the same emotional or religious meaning for every couple. What could unite the marriages of a childless pair of Washington or Wall Street power brokers, a pair of devout Mormons with (literally) a dozen children, a mutually antagonistic Irish-Catholic pair who don’t believe in divorce, Larry King and his seventeenth wife, a Florida widow and widower who go to the justice of the peace and later tell their respective grandchildren? But we agree to disagree on whose marriage is “good”—and nevertheless to share the same baggy, pluralist term.

Marriage is an unbelievably, and irreplaceably, complex shorthand, a shared legal mailbox that lets the state, employers, courts, pension programs, life insurers, health insurers, jails, hospitals, food-stamp programs, banks, cemeteries, and more decide which relationships to take seriously. Its rules have accumulated over centuries to cover an astonishing array of contingencies. Lesbians and gay men are no better or worse than our siblings: at life’s extremes, we too need help deciding what’s just. In American law, in world law, only the M-word covers it all.

Which brings us back to the main point. Marriage has been a kind of Jerusalem, an archaeological site on which the present is constantly building over the past, so that the many layers of history twist and tilt into today’s walls and floors. Many people believe that theirs is the one true claim to this holy ground. But marriage has always been a battleground, owned and defined first by one group, and then by another. While marriage may retain its ancient name, little else in this city has remained the same—not its boundaries, boulevards, or daily habits—except the fact that it is inhabited by human beings. ■ E. J. Graff, author of the recently reissued What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution (Beacon Press), is a visiting scholar at the Brandeis Women’s Studies Research Center and a contributing editor to Out and The American Prospect.

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Haute Cuisine for a A new wave in culinary thinking is shortening the distance from farm to fork, and the results are…magnifique!

S

BY CRISTINA MERRILL

et on 82 bucolic acres in the Pocantico Hills near Tarrytown, New York, the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture is fast becoming part of a quiet revolution in eating and growing. This is the kind of pastoral retreat that can make you forget, for a time, that Manhattan is only 30 minutes south: Chickens and turkeys scratch in the dirt outside well-tended coops, cows and sheep graze on the hillsides, and riders canter along shady trails in search of hitching posts. A 22,000-square-foot, four-seasons greenhouse and three acres of fields and gardens burst with prized fruits and vegetables, such as claytonia lettuce, imperial star artichokes, and indigo radicchio.

And yet this is no ordinary farm. It is, rather, an experiment in ecologically sound agriculture, where neither pesticides nor chemical fertilizers are used, where children and adults can learn the basics of sustainable farming at an education center, and where the centerpiece is not some charming turn-of-the-century farmhouse but an elegant, 90seat restaurant in a Norman-style stone barn—the type of establishment that is drawing gastronomes from the big city and surrounding Westchester suburbs. Stone Barns’s seriousness of purpose is further underlined by its backing: $30 million from David Rockefeller, grandson of oil magnate John D. and widower of Peggy, whose cause célèbre was the preservation of New York farmlands.

The farm and its restaurant, Blue Hill at Stone Barns, are the most prominent East Coast exemplars of a movement started 30 years ago in Berkeley, California, by Alice Waters, the famed mastermind behind the restaurant Chez Panisse. It is Waters who introduced the American palate to the concept of organic cooking with the freshest locally grown produce available on a seasonal basis. That quiet insurrection has in recent years snowballed into a burgeoning interest in both sustainable farming and sustainable cuisine. In its broadest sense, sustainable farming refers to the use of growing methods that do minimal harm to the environment, encouraging fecundity through the use of compost and manure, and reducing the number of miles that food travels from source to plate. Sustainable cuisine, which regrettably sounds about as enticing as “school lunch,” is the result of this effort: It is a close cousin of the European notion of cuisine du terroir, a phrase that travelers to the south of France know well, and one that guarantees a meal made from local ingredients, according to regional recipes.

The moving force behind the Stone Barns restaurant and farm is Dan Barber, 35, a former apprentice of Waters who worked with her when he was in his twenties. Barber is also founder and co-owner of Blue Hill in New York City, which operates according to a similar philosophy, offering dishes like poached duck with a stew of organic carrots and butternut-squash ravioli. He is a lean man, with warm and

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expressive blue eyes, who often tells his cooks, “If you like the view, eat it.” Having worked on his grandparents’ farm in the Berkshires as a child, Barber firmly believes that “the road ingredients travel is an essential part of a food’s character.” The proof is in the five-course meals served at his restaurants, which might include buttercrunch bibb lettuce in pancetta vinaigrette, grass-fed baby lamb with quinoa crust, and creamy ricotta cheesecake made with Stone Barns sheep’s milk. This kind of cuisine, with a prix-fixe menu starting at $52, attracts an upscale clientele, many of whom become inadvertent converts to Barber’s beliefs about the preservation of the environment and the health of our food supply. A well-fed and well-connected patron, he has discovered, can be a very potent agent for revolution.

“The message doesn’t have to be a direct, political one,” Barber says. “We are striving for an unconscious connection between eating your carrots and knowing they’re good because you’ve seen them pop out of the ground. To reach a broader audience in Westchester, we have to appeal to the people who can effect change. We’re inviting them into a hedonistic experience.”

This is a far cry from the kind of grains-and-granola culinary thinking of the 1960s and ’70s, when Frances Moore Lappé’s Diet for a Small Planet became a long-lived best-seller. Yet the presentday movement, for all its gastronomic flourishes, has its roots in the counterculture of a previous generation. “We were rebelling against everything—TV dinners, electric knives—but we really didn’t have a clue how to cook,” says Deborah Madison, author of Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating from America’s Farmers’ Markets (Broadway Books, 2002) and a founder, in 1979, of Greens Restaurant in San Francisco.

Waters, Madison, and other chefs and restaurateurs struggled at first to introduce the concept of farm-fresh eating and to develop relationships with local farmers. Nora Pouillon, the Viennese-born owner of Nora, in Washington, D.C., the first certified organic restaurant in the country, recalls that when she opened her restaurant 25 years ago, the “produce section of the local grocery was one of the smallest in the entire store. There were five kinds of oranges but no fresh lettuce.

I sensed that all the food on the shelves had sugar in it, that it was enriched, and it certainly didn’t have the smell and freshness of taste I remembered from Europe.” Pouillon now has a full-time employee who sources organic produce from dozens of farmers, a role Waters first introduced as that of a “forager.” And Waters now maintains relationships with more than 60 local suppliers of everything from fruits and vegetables to dairy products.

The ties with farmer-suppliers are crucial to the success of sustainable cuisine, and these new additions to the restaurant’s team get involved in ways previously unheard of in the business. Peter Bosley, January 2005 www.plentymag.com

Sustainable Planet

IMAGE MICHAEL MORAN

STONE BARNS Center for Food and Agriculture, set on 82 verdant acres in the Pocantico Hills of New York State.

chef and founder of Parker’s Restaurant in Cleveland, whose authentic Midwestern menu recently placed it among Gourmet’s top 50 dining spots, says he considers his providers better friends and colleagues than many of the area chefs. “I don’t speak their trendy language very well,” he adds. At Gabriella Café, in Santa Cruz, California, chef Jim Donovan brought a bigger cast of characters into the culinary arena after launching “dinners on the farm,” where farmers host outdoor meals cooked by a guest chef. Following a tour of the fields and gardens, the guests gather to hear the growers, the wine maker, the chef, and sometimes the cheese maker explain where the evening repast comes from. Diners and staff then assemble at long rustic tables, where the fare might include fresh arugulaand-fava-bean salad, grilled rib-eye steak, butterball potatoes, baby artichokes, and salsa. www.plentymag.com January 2005

“There are relationships to be made and interesting stories behind every meal,” says Donovan. “When they're part of it, people feel like members of the community.” The chef, whose brother is an organic farmer, hopes to extend the model to other restaurants nationwide. Even as chefs and farmers are spreading the gospel, the movement is enjoying another more public boost with “Chefs A' Field,” a PBS television series that launched its second season this fall and was sufficiently noteworthy to garner the prestigious James Beard Foundation Award for best national television cooking series in 2004. The half-hour programs begin in the kitchen of well-known restaurants, and then follow the chefs as they interact with local farmers and fishermen, returning to the kitchen to capture on camera the preparation of one or more the restaurant's specialties.

“As Barber likes to point out, Americans are now “living on the far side of a broken connection, with food traveling on average upward of 1,500 miles from farm to fork”—and at the expense of both taste and vital fossil fuels. Only two percent of the population is involved in farming, a sharp decline that occurred during the 1950s as a result of the industrialization of agriculture, turning it into “agribusiness,” and the government policies that encouraged maximizing production with minimal labor. The emphasis on mechanization and the increased use of chemicals have resulted in topsoil depletion, groundwater contamination, and food leached of quality and flavor. The upshot is that people have become disconnected from nature and the seasonal character of what they consume.

Paradoxically—and fortuitously—farmers’ markets have been on the rise during the last decade, increasing in number by almost 80 percent between 1994 and 2002 (estimates put the number at around 3,100 nationwide).

For urban chefs, the rural producers who congregate at makeshift stalls in corners of cities such as Seattle, Boston, Chicago, or New York offer a bounty of fresh fruits, vegetables, cheeses, and other homegrown and homemade delights. Peter Hoffman, chef and owner of Savoy in New York, is a regular at Manhattan’s Union Square green market. “It’s a way for me to be in touch with the seasons and the natural world. I get great products to cook and a lot of inspiration.” One of his favorites is the fresh asparagus he buys in season from particular suppliers: It has, he claims, “a heightened asparagusness.”

Madison, who spent five years visiting more than 100 farmers’ markets across the country to research her book, sings the praises of Pancho Dutch leeks and the French butter peas she discovered in a San Francisco market, the Passport melons she encountered in St. Paul, and the chilies and black raspberries she buys in her native city of Santa Fe. As she points out, we don’t even know the names of, let alone consume, the many varieties of fruits and vegetables once indigenous to this country: 950 types of peas, 4,000 of tomatoes, 125 P L E N T Y | 79

of watermelon, or 650 of GLOSSARY FOR SMART EATING potatoes. Occasionally, the search for authenticity can ARTISANAL FOODS Handmade products that promote a local lead to the brink of lunacy: culinary tradition; these can range from bread and cheese to honey and Gary Paul Nabhan, author olive oil. of Coming Home to Eat: BIODYNAMIC FARMING A holistic approach to agriculture in which The Pleasures and Politics all aspects of the farm balance one another. In addition to organic farmof Local Foods (W. W. ing methods, biodynamics incorporates crop rotation, on-farm composting, and natural “medicines” applied to compost, soil, and crops at Norton, 2001), spent a specific times of the year. year traveling in search of COMMUNITY SUPPORTED AGRICULTURE (CSA) A farmer-to-conan “extended communsumer exchange system by which consumers pay an upfront fee and in ion” with the native flora return receive regular deliveries of fresh produce during the seasons of and fauna within 250 their availability. miles of his home in FORAGER A person on a restaurant’s staff assigned the tasks of Arizona, and then wrote seeking out the best, freshest ingredients available and forging links about the best ways to with the farmers who grow them. process cactus buds, roast GRASS-FED LIVESTOCK Grass-fed animals are raised and often mescal in a pit, and unfinished on grass, rather than in feedlots. This is considered a lowerstress, more natural environment. Grass can’t fatten animals as quickly earth “sand food”—exotic varieties of cactus. as grain, but it is healthier and does not require large amounts of Some say the new emphasis on farm-to-table cooking is a reaction supplemental antibiotics. Meat from grass-fed animals is thought to be to the “uniculture” developed over the past 50 years, and not just in healthier than grain-fed meat for many reasons, including the presence food—it’s the sameness encountered in malls, supermarkets, fastof more Omega-3 fatty acids and a lower fat content. food joints, and even city planning. For sustainable chefs, nature HUMUS Finished compost, formed through the breakdown of plants offers a respite from uniformity and a bottomless source of inspiraand animal matter. Humus retains and slowly releases nutrients to plants. tion. Donovan, who laments the boredom of growing up in a Silicon SLOW FOOD What started as a journalist’s protest against the openValley suburb, says he looks forward to the cycle of the seasons as an ing of a McDonald’s in Rome’s historic Piazza di Spagna, in 1986, led to incentive to create something new from scratch every week. A talentan international wine-and-food association headquartered in a small ed artist as well as a cook, he treks dozens of miles in the morning to town in the Piedmont region of southern Italy. Its goals are a greater draw large pictures in the sand before shopping at the farmers’ mardiversity of edibles and the preservation of small-scale food production and local culture. Slow Food—now a term used to describe local, susket in San Francisco. His sand drawings can be enjoyed only briefly, tainably produced food—has since grown to include more than 65,000 before the waves wash them away, and he compares the experience of members, organized through 400 local convivia (chapters) in 40 counpreparing and eating one of his farm dinners with the ephemeral tries. Although the movement’s roots are nature of his artwork. “After our dinners, in Europe, its strongest growth has been once we’ve cleaned the plate, it seems as in the United States.

FARM VEGETABLE RAGOÛT if we were never there. It makes me ORGANIC FOOD Food that is produced This savory stew of vegetables and fruits comes from Frank appreciate nature better, and makes me without pesticides, fertilizers, growth Stitt of the Highlands Bar & Grill in Birmingham, Alabama. Stitt feel free to compose again soon.” hormones, antibiotics, artificial additives, is one of the chefs featured on the PBS series “Chefs A’ Field.”

Cultural anthropologist Amy B. or food coloring. It is also not genetically 8 radishes Trubek claims the chefs’ attitudes reflect a modified in any way. In 2002 the U.S. 4 young turnips, cut into eighths Department of Agriculture (USDA) intronostalgia for the way we lived before tech4 young golden beets duced a set of national standards that nology took us away from the land. “We 4 young red beets food labeled “organic” must meet, used to be much more involved in produc4 baby fennel, coarsely chopped whether it is grown in the United States 4 young carrots, peeled and coarsely chopped ing our own food,” she says. Though it’s or imported from other countries.

1 apple such as Fuji or Braeburn, cored and cut into eighths unlikely that we will forswear Chilean Under these USDA standards, organic 1 pear such as bosc or sekel, cored and cut in small wedges grapes or make the farmers’ market our food is produced by farmers who empha2 TB butter only shopping destination, Trubek says 2 TB extra virgin olive oil size the use of renewable resources and that the role of today’s chefs is to teach us 1 TB sherry vinegar the conservation of soil and water to Spring water again to cook responsibly by offering an enhance environmental quality for future Kosher salt alternative to the shortcuts we have generations. Organic meat, poultry, eggs, Sugar embraced in the last 50 years. But their and dairy products come from animals Zest of one lemon that are given neither antibiotics nor success, she adds, will depend on the Lemon-infused olive oil growth hormones. Organic food is prooptions that we, as consumers, ultimately In a small saucepan, place the vegetables and fruits with a pinch duced without the use of most convenselect. Says Barber, “Through our choices of salt, sugar, a little butter and olive oil and barely enough tional pesticides; fertilizers made with of food and ingredients, all of us—diners, water to cover. Bring to a boil and simmer until just tender— synthetic ingredients or sewage sludge; the beets will take the longest and more water may be needwaiters, and chefs alike—are active particbioengineering; or ionizing radiation. ed.

Peel the beets and cut into quarters.

Toss all the vegetables ipants in not just eating, but in agriculture.

Before a product can be labeled “organtogether with the syrupy juices and add a little more water and With every food-purchasing decision, we ic,” a government-approved certifier butter if needed. Bring to a simmer. Add lemon zest, a little are helping to create the world we want to inspects the farm or the company that lemon oil and the sherry vinegar, then taste for seasonings. live in, one bite at a time.’’ g Serve with topped with chopped chives or chervil. handles or processes the food to verify Recipe with permission from Chefs A’ Field/Warner Hanson Television.

Cristina Merrill is a senior editor of Plenty.

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the rules necessary to meet USDA organic standards.

January 2005 www.plentymag.com

LOWER LEFT: CARINA SALVI; ALL OTHER IMAGES KEN KOCHEY

For sustainable chefs, nature offers a respite from uniformity and a bottomless source of inspiration.

SCENES FROM A REVOLUTION: Chefs pitch in as farmers and growers.

At lower left, the interior of Blue Hill, the restaurant at the Stone Barns Center.

Lower right: asparagus with hazelnuts and a farmfresh egg yolk.

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Dressed to Chill I am standing, mouth agape, at the counter of a vintage clothing store on Honolulu’s Kalakaua Avenue, just up the street from Prada and Burberry and Louis Vuitton.

Behind the counter, as lovingly exhibited as if they were Rodins or Brancusis, are plastic-covered pairs of faded, dilapidated, faintly sad Levis. Their cost to wear—or display? From $550 to—hold your breath—$35,000.

These old pants are a favorite with Japanese tourists, famous for their cutting-edge appetites, and I like them too. And not just because their sturdy heft and delightful pale blue cannot be faked. They represent a paradox sweeping fashion: The fact that something frankly frayed, something recycled, something retrieved, can cost far more than something new—while at the same time rendering the wearer far hipper.

Truth is, there’s a raffish charm to sporting an outfit that’s already had its edges rubbed off. It isn’t just that you feel more virtuous and far less wasteful enjoying fashions that have a history: It’s also the case that you don’t want to look too fresh, too crisp this season, which is apparently all about laid-back, slightly louche luxury.

Some people are dedicated to living more frugal, less wasteful lives. But for others, the real appeal of the elevated secondhand item lurks in certain unspoken assumptions: It’s supposed to look like you inherited your faintly ratty alligator clutch and distressed tweeds from a rich relation—that your casual chic is due to lineage, not just good taste.

But perhaps you are one of the many, many shoppers who cannot resist the lure of something truly brand new, as long as it’s made with a keen awareness of the environment. Consider the plight of the ecoconscious woman who, for reasons that cannot be called rational, craves one of those furry, grandmotherly shrugs that are on practically every page of fashion magazines this autumn. She can buy her staples from brands like Under the Canopy or coolnotcruel, two labels that wear their eco-progressive politics on their stylish sleeves, but 82 | P L E N T Y

what if she’s just got to have one of these fall 2004 shrugs?

A spin through the illustrious Bergdorf Goodman in New York City on a recent Saturday turned up the aforementioned stole in all its mangy glory, and in any number of fibers—real fur to be sure, but also many delightful reproductions for the legions of women who demand that their outerwear be cruelty-free.

A young designer called Milly, who shows during New York’s fashion week and is having what the style world calls “a moment,” offers a non-fur shrug so classic it could have been worn by Joan Crawford in The Best of Everything. Comme des Garçons, the iconic Japanese label, has a version that sports a frankly fake gloss and a four-figure price tag.

Or, if our shopper comes to her senses and realizes the shrug will have a two-minute life span (it’s hard to believe this item will survive much past January 2005), there’s always Jean Paul Gaultier, a fellow so exalted he’s designing the fashion line for Hermès these days. For his own line, Gaultier has created a leopard trench with furry cuffs, which might well be leather and ocelot. But they aren’t.

And then there are goods that straddle both worlds: They’re not exactly secondhand, but they’ve been reconstructed from vintage garments and now reside on the racks of upscale stores. A company called The Reeds takes those fishermen’s sweaters we all wore at one time or another, cuts them up, turns them into cardigans, attaches lavish ribbons, giant buttons, and (oh, the irony!) swaths of real, if recycled, fur. The Reeds have done the same thing with cashmere, where beads and bejeweled buttons now enliven once somber old sweaters.

All of their efforts are available at Barneys, a place that is worlds away from, say, Filthmart on Avenue B in the East Village, where, if you are so inclined and handy with a needle, you can unearth an old pullover and embellish it yourself.

And while you’re there, keep your eyes peeled for a pair of jeans as soft and cerulean as those thousand-dollar Levis.

–Lynn Yaeger January 2005 www.plentymag.com

JUST WEAR A SMILE AND A SHRUG Abigail, this page, in a blue crushed-velvet dress with silver embroidery by Nanette Lepore. Honey color faux-fur wrap by Milly. At left, Abigail wears a black dress with a fur collar and vintage fabric pieces by Nanette Lepore. Styling by Ise White at Code Management.

Model is Abigail from Ford Models, New York. Makeup (all animal-free tested) by Robert Moulton at Ennis for Bare Essentials. Hair by Gavin Anesbury at Stockland Martel.

Photographs by Francis Murphy.

ORGANIC MATERIALS AND RECYCLED FABRICS MAKE FOR CLOTHES THAT ARE SHARP, SASSY, AND DOWN TO EARTH....HAND-ME-DOWNS WILL NEVER BE THE SAME.

Couture au Naturel

OUT OF THE WOODS Ariadna (left) shimmers in a hemp/silk blend charmeuse slip dress, by coolnotcruel. Eva’s recycled parachute blouse, opposite, is from Mel en Stel.

Organic linen pants, Under the Canopy; vintage ’40s feather hat and vintage ’80s Leather Shop belt’.

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January 2005 www.plentymag.com

www.plentymag.com January 2005

P L E N T Y | 85

TO “GO ECO” TODAY IS TO CHOOSE CLOTHES THAT ARE WELL TAILORED AND COMFORTABLE. “STYLE SHOULD NEVER BE A GUILT TRIP,” AS ONE DESIGNER PUTS IT.

GREEN CHIC Ariadna, this page, in an organic cotton blouse by coolnotcruel, organic linen pants, and a multicolored organic wool poncho, both from Under the Canopy.

Where to buy: coolnotcruel and Mel en Stel available at 30 Vandam, New York City and www.coolnotcruel.com.

Under the Canopy, online at www.underthecanopy.com. Patagonia gear and clothing at Patagonia stores nationwide and online at www.patagonia.com. Models are Ariadna and Eva Sno from QModels, New York. Makeup (all animal-free tested) by Makeup For Ever at 409 West Broadway in Soho, New York, and selected Sephora outlets. Hair and Makeup: Dorothy Lata from Perrella Management.com.

Photographs: Francis Murphy.

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January 2005 www.plentymag.com

H E A LT H

THERAPEUTIC TEA

THE MAGIC ELIXIR A botanical drawing of the green tea plant, by Elizabeth Blackwell, 1782.

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“Nothing is comparable to this plant,” wrote Nikolas Tulp, a 17th-century Dutch physician besotted with a new import from China: the tea leaf. “Those who use it are…exempt from all maladies and reach an extreme old age.”

Tulp was not privy, of course, to controlled clinical trials and cell culture analysis. But if he had been, his ardor would have been only slightly dimmed. At an increasing rate over the past ten years, science has revealed an unusual array of health benefits from this ubiquitous beverage—second only to water as the most frequently consumed drink in the world. In test tubes, animal research, and human studies, tea has been shown to afford protection against heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes, osteoporosis, and other conditions. It boosts the immune system’s frontline defenses.

Lest you run to the kitchen to brew up some pale chamomile decoction, however, a definition is in order. Tea, true tea—the infusion that has piqued the curiosity of modern science—comes from Camellia sinensis, a densely branched bush with glossy leaves.

Depending on how the plant’s tender, topmost pluckings are processed, a black, oolong, or green tea (in nutritional terms, near equivalents) can be produced. To put it plainly, herbals are not tea.

Today, medicine’s interest in the real thing has grown out of a fascination with phytochemicals, which are plant compounds with potent health benefits. Decades of observing large human populations has confirmed that fruits and vegetables are indisputably good for us, in ways that go well beyond supplying essential vitamins and minerals. Among the most intriguing classes of phytochemicals are the plant pigments known as flavonoids, of which there are perhaps 4,000. Within this sprawling group are astringent compounds known as catechins.

And tea’s catechins pack a bigger punch than almost any biologically active chemical in fresh produce. They act as antioxidants, which are substances that scavenge free radicals, those unstable molecules whose depredations of DNA contribute to chronic disJanuary 2005 www.plentymag.com

STAPLETON COLLECTION/CORBIS

THE POTENT HEALTH BENEFITS OF THE BEVERAGE BREWED FROM THE COMMON CAMELLIA SINENSIS INCLUDE A STRENGTHENED IMMUNE SYSTEM AND LOWER RATES OF HEART DISEASE. MADELINE DREXLER

H E A LT H

Ever since the Boston Tea Party, Americans have preferred the sharp caffeination of that other hot drink. Could Starbucks Nation, with its cup holder-equipped SUVs, transform itself into a land of Zen aesthetes pouring from Yixing clay pots?

Department of Agriculture to draw up a bevUSDA Human Nutrition Research Center on ease and hasten the aging process. By conerage pyramid—similar to the current food Aging at Tufts University in Boston. “But trast, while coffee may stimulate us more pyramid—with nutrient-dense, noncaloric when you add all those up, the bottom line is with its higher levels of caffeine, it has tea occupying a big chunk of its base. How that tea is a healthful beverage choice.” demonstrated few of tea’s health advantages. much is enough? At least three to four cups Yet tea research is only in its infancy. In This year medical investigators will puba day of steaming, freshly brewed tea (iced medical science, the results of large populalish from 300 to 400 studies on tea, a reflecand ready-to-drink infusions are less tion studies are considered the sine qua non tion of their growing professional stake in flavonoid endowed). Black, oolong, green— of theoretical proof and of regulatory the beverage. Until recently science had priit doesn’t matter. Nor does the addition of approval for health claims. But teasing out marily targeted tea’s antioxidant attributes. milk seem to hurt.

But the “Vertues of the Leaf TEA,” Failing the conversion of the cofas a 1660 English medical broadTHE PERFECT CUP OF TEA… fee crowd, researchers may extract side put it, may be more diverse. starts with fresh tap or bottled spring water (avoid re-using already some of tea’s magical constituents According to new research, tea boiled or distilled water). Bring the water to a boil in a teakettle, and and convert them into a supplement, alters the complex “signal transducin the meantime, heat your teapot by filling it with hot tap water. patch, ointment, or food additive. tion pathways” within cells that can Once the water has boiled, remove the kettle from the heat and This year, for instance, an over-thetrigger or suppress cancer and other empty the hot water from the teapot. Add about one rounded teacounter pill called ImmuneGuard diseases. At Harvard University, spoon of loose tea leaves per cup to the pot (an infuser basket may will hit the shelves, pairing two researchers have found that tea safealso be used, but avoid tea-ball strainers, which do not allow all the ingredients extracted from (and natguards us by strengthening the leaves to fully unravel, or tea bags, which often contain broken and urally combined in) black tea: an immune system’s main bulwark dusty bits of leaves). immune-system stimulator and a against infection and cancer.

Pour the freshly boiled water over the leaves, and allow the tea to powerful antioxidant.

Tea’s long menu of benefits is steep. The time will depend on the kind of tea: two to three minAll of which seems vulgarly also suggested by other recent sciutes for green teas; three to five for black varieties, including Earl reductionist to tea aficionados. It’s entific findings. Its abundant Grey, Darjeeling, and Lapsang Souchong; and five to seven for not just the vaunted compound epiflavonoids have antibacterial, oolong. Do not over infuse, or you’ll end up with bitter-tasting tea. gallocatechin-3-gallate (EGCG) that antiviral, anticancer, anti-inflammaAt the end of the allotted time, decant all of the tea into cups or accounts for tea’s restorative qualitory, and antithrombotic effects. In remove the tea leaves. ties, they argue; it’s also the contemanimal experiments, tea has helped plative ritual of preparation and the protect against tumors of the skin, extraordinary array of tastes. Tea awakens 95 the specific effects of tea drinking in big lung, esophagus, stomach, liver, pancreas, percent of the human palate, more than any groups is a tricky proposition. In North bladder, small intestine, colon, and prostate. food except the grape, a fact that hints at the America, for instance, tea drinkers often A study with mice suggests it may also leaf’s rich phytochemical mix. engage in other healthy habits that confound reduce the risk of rheumatoid arthritis.

For the poet, or even the poet-scientist, the results. Researchers say that if they had a In human clinical-intervention trials— tea is more than the sum of its parts. Carol cool $20 billion to analyze thoroughly the where researchers give volunteers preGreenwood, a professor of nutrition sciences salubrious effects of this 5,000-year-old bevscribed doses of either tea or a placebo and at the University of Toronto, pointed that out erage, they would design five- or ten-year compare the outcomes—tea has lowered at the end of a long interview. “Ninety perstudies of dedicated tea drinkers (at least cholesterol, relaxed blood vessels, curbed cent of our conversation has been about the four cups a day) and non-imbibers and focus cancer biomarkers in smokers, regulated polyphenols in tea,” she said. “But what’s on end points such as cardiovascular disease, glucose levels in diabetics, and fired up fat more important—sitting down and being cancer, immune responses, and inflammametabolism. In more leisurely observational able to enjoy the subtle differences between tion. They would also carry out a lot more research—where epidemiologists study a Darjeelings and oolongs, or measuring the small intervention trials, using both tea and large group of people without intervening, in amount of catechins in the cup?” placebos and cataloguing the results. order to find out how existing dietary patLu T’ung, a ninth-century Taoist poet and one But who would sign up? Ever since the terns shape disease risk—tea drinking has of the first tea masters, put the thought more simBoston Tea Party, Americans have preferred been linked to lower rates of heart disease, ply: “I am in no way interested in immortality,” he the sharp caffeination of that other hot drink. death after heart attack, certain cancers, and wrote, “but only in the taste of tea.” ■ Could Starbucks Nation, with its cup holderdental decay, as well as to increased boneequipped SUVs, transform itself into a land mineral density.

Madeline Drexler is a Boston-based journalof Zen aesthetes pouring from Yixing clay “I’m not claiming that tea is a panacea ist and the author of Secret Agents: The pots? for all of mankind’s ills,” says Jeffrey Menace of Emerging Infections (Penguin, Scientists who have steeped themselves Blumberg, Ph.D., chief of the Antioxidants 2003). in the data hope so. They want the U.S. Research Laboratory at the Jean Mayer 90 | P L E N T Y

January 2005 www.plentymag.com

DESIGN

AGAINST THE GRAIN ELEGANCE AND STYLE FROM UNEXPECTED SOURCES

PEGASUS DINING TABLE

Though it may be true that nature abhors a vacuum, a smart designer can always fill the gap with savvy and substance. When 37-year-old Jill Salisbury was working for an architectural firm in Chicago a few years ago, one of the clients asked her to do environmentally friendly furniture for a high-end project. “I realized there wasn’t anything out there to meet the need for both high style and sustainability,” she recalls. “So that’s where the seed was planted.”

That seed grew into a company known simply as el, short for Environmental Language (www.el-furniture.com), launched in November of 2003 with the goal of producing elegant residential furniture from renewable resources and nontoxic materials. Before making even a rough sketch, Salisbury, who had won accolades for a stainless-steel sling chair earlier in her career, hired an environmental consultant to advise her on protocol for her line of furnishings. “We determined that el would be bionutrient, and that means that every component that goes into a piece is natural and will safely biodegrade at the end of its useful life,” she says. “We also use all nontoxic finishes, which are better for indoor air quality.”

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Among the materials incorporated into her designs are natural latex, hemp, cotton batting, and barrier cloth; hidden structural parts are made from formaldehyde-free wheat board. The wooden elements range from the practical, like sustainably harvested hardwood, to the exotic, such as bamboo, which grows back in five years and is becoming more popular as a flooring material because of its solidity and durability. Another unusual choice is palm wood. (“After 80 years, the palm tree no longer produces coconuts,” Salisbury explains, “so they have to cut those trees down and replant them.”) Most recently, the designer has been working with a redwood once used in holding tanks and now reclaimed from the wine industry. “The wood is naturally stained from red grapes,” she says. “It’s really beautiful.” And, of course, “it smells amazing.”

Salisbury’s influences come from the Far East, as evidenced by her “origami” table, which seems to fold in on itself, or a dining table whose flaring legs recall Chinese design. If the price tag seems high (around $5,000 for a bistro table), consider that each piece is handmade and of heirloom quality. Your grandchildren will thank you. And so will Mother Earth. g January 2005 www.plentymag.com

JEFF SCHINDLER AT SANDRO, INC.

Handsomely carved and 120 inches long, it’s made from certified sustainably harvested maple with grooved indentations. The finish derives from natural products, including tree sap.

THE BUFFET SERVER from the Pegasus series is also fashioned from sustainably harvested maple, with natural finishes to bring out the rich grain of the wood.

LYRA DINING CHAIR The curving back and legs are made from steam-bent maple; the natural-latex seat cushion is covered in wool.

THE ORIGAMI TABLE is walnut with palm-wood inlays and a granite top.

(Because pieces are custom made, other materials may be selected.) www.plentymag.com January 2005

P L E N T Y | 93

S H E LT E R

HOUSE PROUD...

AND WITH GOOD REASON Our house of the future can be built today to take full advantage of both the natural beauty of its site and the latest in technological breakthroughs. While modest in size—only 2,000 square feet—this “eco-house” is innovative in its design, oriented in the best direction for overall energy efficiency, and aspires to a nearly weightless appearance.

■ The exterior louvers control sunlight, allowing for diffuse northern and eastern light while shading the southern and western exposures.

Solar collectors placed on the downward slope heat the interior water supply and the pool, and on most sunny days, these could meet 50 to 75 percent of the house’s hot-water needs. (In the Rocky Mountain area, approximately 170 watts per square meter can be derived from solar energy.) The partial underground construction also aids in heating and cooling. The roof includes a rain- and snowcollection system for irrigation and supplemental water; combined 94 | P L E N T Y

with recycled waste water, these could reduce the house’s water consumption by approximately 50 percent.

■ Many other steps can be taken to make this house—or any other house—more eco-friendly: the basic structural elements might contain large percentages of recycled steel; cork flooring in the kitchen can take advantage of an easily renewable material; and recycled barn-wood floors would add a touch of tradition without chopping down a single tree.

■ Other forward-looking steps include using photovoltaic cells to generate electricity (a photovoltaic system, which costs about $5 a watt to install, could provide between 25 to 40 percent of the building’s energy needs); installing low-flush toilets and faucet aerators; and planting native drought-resistant flora to cut down on the need for regular watering.

January 2005 www.plentymag.com

WHILE MODEST IN SIZE—ONLY 2,000 SQUARE FEET—THIS “ECO-HOUSE” IS INNOVATIVE IN ITS DESIGN, ORIENTED IN THE BEST DIRECTION FOR OVERALL ENERGY EFFICIENCY, AND ASPIRES TO A NEARLY WEIGHTLESS APPEARANCE.

THE DESIGN TEAM This house was designed by members of the architectural firm HLW International LLP in New York City. They include Arnold Lee, AIA, design partner; John Mack, AIA, design partner; Vu Tran, project designer; and the design team of Susan Kaplan, George Sucato, Lindsley Humbert, Anthony Curiale, and Nigel-Ann La Qua. P L E N T Y | 95

T H E B AC K PAG E

C E N T R A L PA R K R E D E F I N E D CHRISTO AND JEANNE-CLAUDE INVITE NEW YORKERS TO RETHINK THEIR URBAN OASIS

F

or more than 40 years, the husband-and-wife team of Christo and Jeanne-Claude has been creating spectacular and shortlived projects that redefine both the nature of architecture and the physical beauty of the landscape. In 1972, for example, the artists suspended a huge orange curtain across Rifle Gap, Colorado, and four years later, they constructed Running Fence, an ephemeral fabric wall undulating through 24 miles in California’s Sonoma and Marin counties. The goal of these and other works, in their words, is “to create gentle disturbances in spaces owned by human beings, to make people become more aware of themselves and their surroundings.” Their large-scale works are temporary; after a few days or weeks, the sites are restored to their original condition and most of the materials are recycled.

In February, 2005, the Christos will unveil their latest project, The Gates, in New York’s Central Park. Consisting of 7,500 saffron-

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colored nylon curtains, each suspended from a frame 16 feet tall and up to 18 feet wide, The Gates will wind their way at 12-foot intervals throughout 23 miles of pedestrian walkways lacing one of the city’s favorite outdoor areas. “The cloth is very special and very vulnerable, and also very immediate. The panels move with the wind and the water. They change colors,” Christo notes. Ultimately their art has to do with a kind of freedom. “We ourselves do not own these works, and this is why they should go away, because freedom is the enemy, and possession is equal to permanence,” he says. The project, which allows pedestrians to pass under the billowing fabric, will remain in situ for 16 days. Then it will be dismantled, and only the memory of the experience will be left. “Nothing remains and everything is recycled,” says Jeanne-Claude. “We are the cleanest artists in the world.” It need hardly be added that they are also among the most ambitious and the most astonishing. ■ January 2005 www.plentymag.com