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SMART LIVING FOR A COMPLEX WORLD
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THE GOOD LIFE
WHAT MAKES US HAPPY?
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SMART LIVING FOR A COMPLEX WORLD
PLENT PLENTYY CONTENTS J U N E / J U LY 2 0 0 5
40
Where the animals are stars
26 . . . . MUSIC
How much is this moment worth?
FRONT MATTER 6 . . . . FROM THE EDITOR 10 . . . . LETTERS 13 . . . . NEWS AND NOTES
Electric car vigils; dumped solar trash bins; organic pot; paper made from poop; and new advice on pesticide-free grocery shopping. 16 . . . . RETREADS That old six-string: they just don’t make ’em like they used to. By Christy Harrison 20 . . . . ON TECHNOLOGY A group of scientists wants nuclear plants to moonlight making hydrogen. By Jim Quinn 24 . . . . WHEELS Hydrogen-powered race cars? BMW hopes the H2R will be the ultimate green machine. By Evelyn Kanter
GRAY MATTER 40 . . . . PARADISE RETAINED
The Galápagos Islands have long been a bellwether for the ecological health of the planet. Will the increasing number of camera-toting tourists obliterate Galápagos’s fragile ecosystem and beauty? Or will they be the ones to rescue it? By Sarah Rose 50 . . . . RAW FOOD RESOLUTION Adherents of the “living foods” movement swear their plant-based diet boosts energy, cures disease and depression, and tastes great. What happens when a pasta-loving coffee addict becomes a raw foodist for two weeks? Can she survive the carrot and the stick? By Jennifer Block 56 . . . . IF IT MAKES YOU HAPPY Happiness think tanks, happiness conferences, happiness-studies programs…The elusive internal smile is under the microscope, and the science shows that our chemistry with nature is essential. Plus, Plenty asks seven photographers for their happiest visions. By Justin Tyler Clark
UPPER LEFT: DOUG ORDWAY; UPPER RIGHT: SVEN-OLOF LINDBLAD
56
Folk music finds its next generation—and moves beyond Dylan comparisons. By Tim Gideon 28 . . . . BOOKS The army gets all New Agey; a deaf man goes space agey in order to hear. 31 . . . . GREEN GEAR Wish a robot could mow your lawn? Rather wear your tofu than eat it? Plenty shows you how.
Not all waters are created equal. From deep beneath the surface, filtered through ancient rock in the lush volcanic region of Auvergne.Volvic, natural spring water.
Created by volcanoes www.volvic-na.com
92 Trash art
64
64 . . . . TWENTY GADGETS THAT WILL SAVE THE WORLD
(Or so we predict.) Cars that backseat drive and others that run on air; refrigerators that rock and cheap clay pots that refrigerate; biodegradable laptops; $100 laptops; spinach batteries. The future is outside the box. By Justin Tyler Clark 70 . . . . AMAZING ENERGY Plenty holds its very own energy pageant and brings you sexy pinups to fuel your dreams of a sustainable future. Here she comes, Miss Methane! And Miss Hydrogen…And Miss Wave…And Miss Turbine… 76 . . . . TRASHY TREASURES A review of 20th-century sculptors who turned trash art into high art. By Ann Landi 82 . . . . THE GREEN IN PERFUME Who’s regulating the ecoimpact of synthetic fragrances? Plenty sniffs around. By Chandler Burr
MATTERS OF FACT AND FANCY 86 . . . . CUTTING EDGE
Our picks from FutureFashion, a collection of haute ECOuture. 88 . . . . FOOD Recipes must not go to the grave, like great Aunt Lil’s schnecken. By Sarah Rose 90 . . . . HEALTH From Flying Pilates to bug-free blankets, ten health tips for air travelers. By Keith Rockmael
Can this car save the world?
92 . . . . HOW WE LIVE
A group of New Yorkers shows us how water filtration can be a religious experience. By Jennifer Block 94 . . . . SIGNS OF THE TIMES Antarctica may not be paradise, but we’re paving it anyway; plus, monster trucks get even scarier. By Philip Higgs and Hillary Rosner 96 . . . . THE BACK PAGE Our editor in chief dresses to impress. By Mark Spellun
ON THE COVER: Model is Stefanie Raben from Ford, wearing a vintage swim cap and crocheted bathing suit. Styling by Ise White; hair and makeup by Wanda Melendez, both with Code Management. Photograph by Francis Murphy.
CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: IMAGE COURTESY MITCHELL-INNES NASH; ILLUSTRATION BY HAL MAYTHORP
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Holy water?
You may get to retire to the sun and fun, but your old cell phones don’t. Rather than retire them to the trash bin or an old sock drawer, recycle. You’ll help our environment and help your neighbors in the process. Take your old cell phones to one of our thousands of national collection centers. We’ll recycle them or refurbish them, and donate a portion of the proceeds to select charities. Visit www.call2recycle.org or call toll-free 877-2-RECYCLE for the recycling center nearest you.
©2004 Rechargeable Battery Recycling Corporation. Founded in 1994, RBRC is a non-profit organization dedicated to recycling rechargeable batteries and cellular phones. For more information: www.rbrc.org or 1-800-8-BATTERY
FROM THE EDITOR IN CHIEF
W
hen we launched Plenty back in November, the New York Times declared we had a new approach to environmentalism that was “more latex, less flannel.” The Times was right on the mark. We wanted to show that being green was sexy and cool. This seems to have resonated with our readers, one of whom wrote in the following: “I’m 30 years old, a recent M.B.A. grad (English lit undergrad), and committed to living as responsibly as possible, without compromising my own sense of style. I own two hybrids (Honda Civic and Ford Escape; my husband drives the latter), drink fair-trade coffee, throw great (vegetarianfriendly) parties, and pay attention to companies’ environmental track records when I buy. I wouldn’t characterize myself as an activist in the true sense, though, and I’m not willing to give up categorically on fabulous leather boots.”
This is our ideal reader. She cares about her impact on the planet—and will even go to considerable lengths to make a difference—but might not want to give up her electric toothbrush. She also describes the mission of Plenty: finding practical solutions to today’s problems. Some matters are best solved by governments, but the answers to many of the world’s most vexing issues come from within. So in this issue we dig deep into the human psyche. In “If It Makes You Happy” (page 56), contributing editor Justin Tyler Clark examines the emerging field of happiness economics. If we were smart, some economists think, we would all spend a little more time in nature—and a little more money preserving it. But if you really have to buy something and you already have an iPod, Justin has a few more tips for you in “Twenty Gadgets That Will Save the World” (page 64). Not all of them will break the bank; some of the most useful and important inventions cost next to nothing but make our daily routine remarkably easier. Managing editor Sarah Rose has a few things to say about ecotourism in her article “Paradise Retained” (page 40). She journeyed to the Galápagos, one of the world’s most fragile and important ecosystems, to see what is being done to preserve it for future generations. This issue also kicks off a new column called Retreads (page 16), by senior editor Christy Harrison. As Christy has promised to show us, not everything hip and fashionable is new. In fact, as any online auction devotee can tell you, it’s frequently the opposite. Reused is sexy. Mark Spellun 6 | PLENTY
June/July 2005 www.plentymag.com
4HE TEACHER SAYS YOGA IS SOMETHING POSITIVE ) DO FOR MYSELF TO CLEANSE THE MIND OF NEGATIVE THOUGHT SO ) CAN´T LET MYSELF FALL VICTIM TO THE ±MONKEY MIND ² ) HAVE TO BE AT ONE WITH MY BREATH OH 'OD ) HOPE MY BREATH ISN´T BAD ) REALLY SHOULD FLOSS MORE PEOPLE WHO FLOSS MORE ACTUALLY LIVE LONGER AND ) ALWAYS FORGET
WHICH IS SO STUPID AND THAT IS A VERY NEGATIVE THOUGHT¨/+ THEN LET NEGATIVE THOUGHTS GO 9OGA WILL MAKE ME THIN AND BEAUTIFUL ALL THE SUPERMODELS DO IT ALTHOUGH THEY ACTUALLY START OUT THIN AND BEAUTIFUL BUT STILL¨ !LSO ) READ THAT YOGA CLEANSES THE BODY OF TOXINS WHICH THE MAGAZINES ALL SAY CAUSES CELLULITE WHICH IS A TOTAL LIE #ELLULITE ISN´T CAUSED IT ISN´T EVEN A CONDITION IT´S A WORD THAT WAS INVENTED IN IN SOME MAGAZINE
AND IT IS JUST THE NATURAL FORMATION OF FEMALE FLESH EXCEPT WHY DOESN´T THAT GIRL IN THE PURPLE TANK TOP IN THE FRONT WHO CAN THROW HER LEGS BEHIND HER HEAD HAVE ANY 7HAT IS SHE DOING THAT )´M NOT DOING ) WOULD DO ANYTHING TO GET RID OF CELLULITE )F ) FOUND OUT THAT PURPLE TANK TOP GIRL IS KILLING PUPPIES TO GET RID OF CELLULITE ) WOULD TOTALLY¨WELL /+ NO ) ACTUALLY WOULDN´T DO THAT¨BUT STILL 3UPPOSEDLY IF YOU DRINK EIGHT GLASSES OF WATER A DAY YOU´LL LOOK LIKE A SUPERMODEL BUT ) AM SICK OF WATER IT´S SO BORING AND OH ) DON´T KNOW WATERY AND BESIDES )´LL NEVER BE A SUPERMODEL ) MEAN LOOK AT THE ODDS 4HERE ARE WHAT THREE BILLION WOMEN ON PLANET EARTH AND TEN OF THEM ARE SUPERMODELS 4HAT MAKES SUPERMODELS THE RAREST OF GENETIC FREAKS ) MIGHT AS WELL FEEL BAD ABOUT MYSELF FOR NOT BEING A HERMAPHRODITE THERE MUST BE LIKE HERMAPHRODITES ON EARTH AT LEAST ) HAD A SHOT AT THAT ONE /+ THAT´S PRETTY NEGATIVE THAT WAS ALL VERY MONKEY MINDISH OF ME (EY WHAT ARE THOSE MONKEYS WITH THE BIG ORANGE BUTTS /RANGUTANS ) WONDER IF ORANGUTANS WANDER AROUND THE JUNGLE ASKING THEIR MATES IF THEIR BUTT ISN´T ORANGE ENOUGH AND THE GUYS ARE ALL ±5H ) THINK YOUR BUTT IS THE PERFECT AMOUNT OF ORANGE ² AND THEN THE GIRL ORANGUTAN IS ALL ±'OD CAN´T G AND YOU KNOW DYE YOU JUST GIVE ME AN HONEST ANSWER BECAUSE SERIOUSLY IF IT´S NOT ORANGE ENOUGH )´LL JUST GO IT WITH SOME KIND OF LEAF OR BERRY WE´VE GOT LYING AROUND THE JUNGLE BECAUSE ) JUST WANT TO HAVE THE MOST PERFECTLY ORANGE BUTT FOR YOU ² /W 4HIS HURTS HOW LONG DO WE HAVE TO HOLD THIS STUPID POSE ) NEED CHOCOLATE 7HICH IS NOT REALLY THAT BAD FOR YOU BECAUSE ) READ THAT IT ACTUALLY CONTAINS A COMPOUND WHICH HELPS FIGHT TOOTH DECAY SO EATING CHOCOLATE IS PRACTICALLY THE SAME AS BRUSHING YOUR TEETH WHICH ) AM GOING TO DO A BETTER JOB OF NOW THAT )´M A POSITIVE PERSON IN YOGA GETTING IN TOUCH WITH MY BREATH WHETHER IT´S BAD OR NOT )´M NOT JUDGING EXCEPT ) AM JUDGING -ISS 0URPLE 4OP "ENDY 'IRL BECAUSE ) THINK SHE MAY HAVE SOLD HER SOUL TO BE THAT CELLULITE FREE WHICH IS A HIGH PRICE TO PAY BUT ON THE OTHER HAND NO CELLULITE¨ #ATHRYN -ICHON COMIC AND AUTHOR OF ±4HE 'RRL 'ENIUS 'UIDE TO 3EX 7ITH /THER 0EOPLE ²
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PLENTY Publisher & Editor in Chief Mark Spellun Creative Director Catherine Cole Managing Editor Sarah Rose Senior Editors Jennifer Block, Christy Harrison, Shana Liebman Science Editor Michael W. Robbins Technology Editor Jim Quinn Music Editor Jesse Kornbluth Staff Writer Kate Siber Associate Editor Sandra Ban
PLENTY NEEDS YOU Are you an aspiring Shakespeare? Picasso? Can you sell clothes to a nudist colony? If so, we want to hear from you! We’re looking for people who believe in our mission, so if you drive a Prius or just wish you did, tell us about yourself.
PLENTY is out to change the world one organic cotton/soy t-shirt at a time. Send us an email or drop us a note. We can’t do it without you. Come join the revolution!
PLENTY
250 West 57th Street Suite 1915 New York, NY 10107 1-212-757-3447 info@plentymag.com
Contributing Editors Justin Tyler Clark, Madeline Drexler, E. J. Graff, Ann Landi, Cristina Merrill, Katherine Millett Staff Photographer Francis Murphy Staff Designer Paul Tutrone
PLENTY Advertising, 250 West 57th Street, Suite 1915, New York, NY 10107 Deborah Gardiner, National Sales Director (Tel: 1-212-757-3794) 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)
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 ©2005 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 (ISSN 1553-2321) is published bimonthly, six times a year, for $12 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, P.O. Box 437, Mt. Morris, IL 61054-0437 or call 1-800-316-9006. PLENTY is printed on 30% post-consumer recycled paper and manufactured with elemental chlorine-free pulp. Please recycle.
Finally, a light smoothie and yogurt that don’t contain aspartame or sucralose. When it comes to making great tasting yogurt and smoothies, we’re a natural. YOU CAN’T FAKE THIS.TM
“STICK TO ENVIRONMENTAL ISSUES. AVOID THE CULTURAL WAR.”
LETTERS I REALLY ENJOY YOUR MAGAZINE and end up referencing articles in conversations that I have with friends and family. It is interesting and thought-provoking, and it promotes resources and products for greener living. I am a former engineer–corporate dropout turned artist. Although you touch on it, I would like to see more features on artisans and their products—everything from artisanal foods to more traditional artists and craftspeople. There are so many people using found objects and recycled and natural materials. Thanks! AMY RANDS LAWRENCEVILLE, GEORGIA
JAMES GRANGER TRAVERSE CITY, MICHIGAN
YOUR MAGAZINE IS NOW MY FAVORITE. It is well written and has a nice design and pictures, great stories, and good-looking ads. If any green magazine is going to be successful, it’ll have to be Plenty. I can’t wait for the next issue! CHARLIE SAMUELS NEW YORK, NEW YORK
10 | P L E N T Y
model on the front cover is impossible for us to identify with. Sincerely, JONATHAN CALLAHAN SEATTLE, WASHINGTON
JUST READ YOUR PREMIER ISSUE. It had some strong edit, but I was totally offended by women wearing T-shirts with the word “Plenty” written across their chests. Another message on another promotional shirt was even worse [see above]. I’m sure it’s not what you intended; but I showed it to a few people over the weekend, and they saw the same message being touted. You may want to rethink that end of things if you’re looking to reach upscale, educated women. KAREN VIA EMAIL
The shirt she objects to is certified organic cotton from coolnotcruel.com by designer and eco—THE EDITORS fashionista Sara Cross.
Send your letters, comments and critiques to letters@plentymag.com June/July 2005 www.plentymag.com
FRANCIS MURPHY
I LIKE YOUR MAG, loved the article about the recycled low-impact housing. Please do more about the prefab stuff. Hell, have some housing in every issue. The recycled steelframe units coming onto the market today are the future of single-family housing. My personal opinion: don’t fall into the trap of attacking the United States or Bush about global warming—so far you haven’t. Stick to environmental issues. Avoid the cultural war. Convince people but do not irritate them, and you will do fine. If people want anti-Americanism, they can read the Guardian. Thanks and God bless,
CONGRATUL ATIONS on getting Plenty off the ground. We are a couple, 42 and 45, living in Seattle with three school-age children and the typical Seattle “eco-kook” environmental ethic. In general, we’re quite pleased with the magazine you are creating. But I must ask that you reconsider the fashion and architecture sections. The action-comic theme of the second issue struck us as somewhat juvenile—though our eight-year-old son and four-year-old daughter were attracted to it. And we find the covers quite unappealing. Whenever we need a dose of models wearing tight-fitting, unfunctional clothing, we can always get a copy of Adbusters. Otherwise, our normal fashion sense comes in the Patagonia catalog. I’d like to see your architecture section focus more on sustainable architecture that is being built in urban settings, as opposed to new homes being plopped down in otherwise pristine environments. We need to encourage urban renewal more than sprawl. Perhaps you should look to your advertisers for a sense of the values your readership holds. The back page of issue two [White Sierra] is my past. The two-page eBay spread on the inside cover is our Norman Rockwell present. The ten ecotourist escapes are hopefully our future. But the kickboxing
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to subscribe and save 50% off the newsstand price, call toll free 1-800-316-9006 or go to www.plentymag.com
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NEWS NOTES THE CRUSHING WARS
N
ow that companies are all pumped up about hybrid- and hydrogen-powered cars, the market for electrics is looking flabby. Most major automakers—including General Motors and Ford, and, to a lesser extent, Toyota and Honda—have discontinued their all-electric models, repossessed the vehicles from lessees, and shipped the rides off to be dismantled. Lately, though, electropower advocates are fighting back. Last February and March, protesters held a 28-day vigil on a General Motors car lot in Burbank, California, demanding that the company let them buy the 77 EV1 electric cars that they had been leasing. The demonstrators’ roundthe-clock campaign ultimately failed: in midMarch GM shipped the cars to Arizona to await recycling or donation to museums. Protesters—nearly 100 enthusiastic EV1 drivers—argued that their battery-packing buggies were the most energy-efficient cars ever produced by an American manufacturer. But GM spokesman Dave Barthmuss said the cars were a flop, bringing in only eight hundred leases in a four-year time frame (while a successful vehicle would bring in hundreds of thousands of leases in that same period). Because most of the car’s replacement parts suppliers have jumped ship, Barthmuss said, liability for the aging cars is also an issue. “We cannot, in good conscience, let those vehicles go on the road,” he said. The drivers responded by offering to release the company from all obligations. GM’s rebuttal: “There’s no such thing as no liability,” Barthmuss said. Demonstrators in another recent effort to save the last electric Ford Ranger EV’s had more success. The company had refused to sell the trucks to their 100-odd remaining leaseholders, citing liability and maintenance issues—but it changed its mind when two California lessees parked their Rangers in front of a line of Ford’s biggest gas guzzlers, vowing not to leave until Ford either sold them the trucks or publicly pried the steering wheels out of their hands. www.plentymag.com June/July 2005
Green idea dumped T
he New York City sanitation department said it is not planning to use the solarpowered compacting trash can that it began testing this Valentine’s Day. The BigBelly bin, not much larger than a regular trash can, uses sensors to figure out when waste levels have reached critical mass, then crushes its contents down to nearly one-eighth of their original size. Compacting trash on-site can dramatically reduce the number of pickups each bin needs, thereby reducing diesel usage, said Jim Poss, the BigBelly’s creator. Powered by solar panels on its exterior, the bin is already being used at eco-advanced national parks and ski resorts across the U.S.. But the Big Apple isn’t biting. While city trash collectors seem happy with the lighter loads produced by the box-shaped BigBelly, the sanitation department said that most people don’t know what the hell it is. “It’s not readily recognizable by the public [as a trash can],” said Kathy Dawkins, a city spokeswoman. Reports in the local media also quot-
ed folks who were confounded by the bin’s odd shape; at least one interviewee said he mistook it for a mailbox. Poss took these complaints in stride. “Getting to the point of creating the solar-powered compactor was a technological feat; teaching people how to use it wouldn’t be,” he said. “I have no doubt that New Yorkers—and for that matter all human beings—are smart enough to figure it out.” Cost is another sticking point for the city. Each BigBelly carries a $4500 price tag, while Dawkins said that the city’s traditional cans cost a mere $100 apiece. Poss calculates that the system can pay for itself in one year, adding that for “bulk” buyers like New York City, his company “can work out financing options.” Has the city seen any difference in pollution and diesel usage while testing the new technology? “I think that the mere fact that we’ve found that [the BigBelly] is not to our liking means those other considerations don’t come into play,” Dawkins said. P L E N T Y | 13
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NEWS NOTES Sensible Sinsemilla A
ll you stoners may have thought your only worry was getting busted by the cops, but here’s another buzzkill: that joint you just rolled could be laced with toxic pesticides. Northern California’s Mendocino County asked the state’s permission to begin an organic certification program for reefer last February, responding to demand from the county’s nearly 2,000 medical marijuana growers and users. “People were getting sick from pesticide residues in medicinal marijuana,” said county commissioner Tony Linegar. California is one of 11 states with medical mary-jane laws on the books, but the drug is still illegal under federal law, and as of press time the Supreme Court is considering a case that could determine which level of government gets the last word. At the moment, federal prohibitions are enforced
somewhat willy-nilly; California agricultural officials, in Mendocino’s case, were sticklers for the rules, stating that certifying marijuana wouldn’t fly with the feds. The maverick county (which was also the first in the country to ban genetically modified crops) investigated another route in getting ganja certified: it asked the state Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR) whether pesticides could legally be used on pot. The state establishes a list of approved pesticides for every crop, but since pot is, er, illegal, no chemicals are registered for use on the plant. So ironically, Linegar said, it is legally mandated to be free of pesticides. A DPR spokesman was a bit more reserved, stating that the department “does not recommend the use of pesticides on medical marijuana crops.”
PLENTY TIP OF THE MONTH:
KEEP PESTICIDES OFF YOUR PLATE Being told you have a peaches-and-cream complexion may not be such a great compliment these days, considering that nearly 94 percent of peaches test positive for pesticide contamination. A new report by the nonprofit Environmental Working Group lists the fruits and vegetables that make up the “dirty dozen” of most-contaminated produce—seemingly innocent fruits like peaches and strawberries top the list—as well as the 12 least contaminated by pesticides. And merely washing your fruits and veggies won’t change their rankings: the produce tested was already washed. While some pesticides can be rinsed away, many are absorbed by the plant through the roots, so there’s no getting rid of them. But never fear: you can lower your pesticide exposure by 90 percent if you simply avoid conventionally grown varieties of the dirty dozen and eat more of the least contaminated produce listed below.
12 MOST CONTAMINATED
12 LEAST CONTAMINATED
(BUY THESE ORGANIC WHENEVER POSSIBLE)
(EAT WITHOUT FEAR)
APPLES BELL PEPPERS CELERY CHERRIES IMPORTED GRAPES NECTARINES PEACHES PEARS POTATOES RED RASPBERRIES SPINACH STRAWBERRIES 14 | P L E N T Y
ASPARAGUS AVOCADOS BANANAS BROCCOLI CAULIFLOWER SWEET CORN KIWIS MANGOES ONIONS PAPAYAS PINEAPPLES SWEET PEAS
EXCREMENTAL ART
A
n Australian paper company has found a new use for feces. Creative Paper Tasmania’s handmade Roo Poo Paper is made of kangaroo and wallaby dung and retails for about $3 per letter-size sheet. The company began selling two versions of the product in May: an arty paper with what it calls a “highly decorative granite finish,” containing 50 percent post-roo material; and a “more commercial creamy, flecked paper” made with 20 percent marsupial manure (the rest, for both versions, is either recycled paper or cotton). Creative Paper Tasmania’s manager, Joanna Gair, said she was inspired to launch the Roo Poo line after reading about the booming elephant-dung paper industry in Africa, which took off in the early 1990s and whose sales now help fund elephant-conservation efforts (as well as the tourism industry). The advent of Roo Poo opens up a new segment in the scat stationery market, said Gair. Perhaps her company’s innovation will also encourage other artisanal papermakers to give crap a chance. Roo and wallaby waste, like most kinds of scat, make good paper stock because the animals excrete the thick plant fibers that are difficult for them to digest—fibers that can then be removed and woven into strong paper. According to the Tasmanian company, the paper is made by collecting and drying the poo, rinsing it to tease out the fibers, boiling it for five hours to sterilize and soften it, then mashing it into a fine pulp that is mixed with the other materials. To get enough raw material to make the paper, the company put out a call for fecal matter in the local newspapers, asking folks around Tasmania to send in any samples that they had lying around.
KYOTO KVETCH
I
n other news, the Kyoto protocol was adopted by all but two of the world’s developed nations in February. Australia, one of the aforementioned meanies, opted out because, its prime minister explained, the international clean-air pact was “next to useless.” It came as no surprise that the treaty’s other rejecter was the United States. —Christy Harrison June/July 2005 www.plentymag.com
RETREADS Musician Eric Clapton—shown here performing at the “Sheryl Crow and Friends” concert in 1999—had a legendary collection of vintage guitars that commanded millions of dollars in recent auctions. Clapton sold “the cream of [his] collection” to benefit Crossroads Centre, the drug-treatment program that he founded.
WHILE MY GUITAR GENTLY KEEPS The sultan of vintage strings on why rock and roll is good for the planet CHRISTY HARRISON ANY LEAVE-NO-FOOTPRINT LIFESTYLE REQUIRES A HEALTHY DOSE OF REUSE. Now that online clearinghouses have turned the used-goods trade into booming business, vintage is in its heyday, and we at Plenty couldn’t be happier. Each issue, “Retreads” will bring you a taste of the venerable, forgotten, previously–loved, or timelessly weird treasures lurking out there, along with a look at the people who save them from the trash compactor’s jaws. Tell us about your old favorites at retreads@plentymag.com. 16 | P L E N T Y
June/July 2005 www.plentymag.com
SUZANNE PLUNKETT, ASSOCIATED PRESS, AP
A
t age 12 George Gruhn was already a consummate entomologist. With six years of experience under his belt, he subscribed to an international insect-studies journal and “was probably the only reader without a Ph.D.,” he said from his Nashville home in a recent phone conversation. In high school he decided reptiles were more his thing and amassed an impressive collection of snakes in his parents’ Chicago-area home; his passion continued through college at the University of Chicago, where he graduated with a bachelor’s degree in animal behavior psychology. But today the 59-year-old Gruhn collects another kind of creature: vintage guitars. One of the country’s leading experts on stringed instruments since he opened the internationally acclaimed store Gruhn Guitars in 1963, Gruhn sees a similarity between his two most recent obsessions. “It is not a big step to go from counting scale rows of snakes to counting the internal braces on an acoustic guitar,” he told the University of Chicago Magazine in 1996. People also treat these instruments as precious objects, he said—more like living things than like throwaway commodities. “There’s little concern with guitars ending up in landfills,” he said. “If they’re goodquality instruments to begin with, they may be fragile in the sense that they can be broken,” added Gruhn, who has sold guitars to the likes of Eric Clapton and Emmylou Harris. “But if they’re cared for properly, they can outlive the original purchaser and last 200, 300 years.” In this day and age, when obsolescence can creep up on objects that have never been taken out of their packaging, that kind of lifespan is extremely rare. “A car lasts ten years or more, but it gets less valuable each mile it’s driven and eventually gets junked,” Gruhn said. In contrast almost all electric guitars by major makers such as Martin, Fender, and Gibson, manufactured through 1965, are appreciating in value today, he said. Even recent models don’t depreciate after they’ve been used: a previously played specimen always fetches about half of the list price, so the price of a given used guitar increases as the list price for the new version climbs. This pricing scheme, which Gruhn
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Fender Stratocaster, 1957. Standard color on 50’s Strats was “sunburst,” a mustard yellow that faded to brown at the edges (think Grandma’s coffee table), but the blond finish shown here was available as an option. A clean blondie with optional gold plated hardware will set you back $40,000 or more today.
18 | P L E N T Y
says makes vintage guitars better investments than stocks or mutual funds, “is different than cars, computers, clothing, almost anything else.” Some folks are grossed out by the thought of wearing someone else’s used Nikes, and “of course people don’t want to buy used food—that’s poo,” he said. But consumers eat up old guitars, to the point where many of the truly vintage instruments are more valuable than their equivalent new models. Why is the guitar so different from other objects? Partly because of design. With guitars, Gruhn said, the old designs work so well that there’s no reason to come up with new ones—no new technology has come along yet to make vintage guitars obsolete. The new Fender electrics on which today’s 13-year-olds are blowing their allowances are based closely on the original 1950 Broadcaster and the 1954 Stratocaster, while today’s folkies are strumming new and used acoustics with roughly the same design as the ones Dylan played. The few new variations that have emerged—guitars with funky star-shaped bodies or souped-up wiring to enhance sound effects, for example—have almost universally failed. Another reason guitars hold their value so well is the old cliché: they just don’t make ’em like they used to. Guitar wood needs to be dried prior to manufacturing, and most of the wood in today’s mass-produced guitars is fired in kilns for speedier drying. Old guitars, in contrast, were made
with “air-seasoned” wood that could take up to ten years to dry—and that produced a superior instrument, in Gruhn’s eyes. Airseasoned wood is held by most woodworkers to be stronger and less likely to warp or crack over time. But the major guitar makers have had a surge in production in the past 20 years (Martin, one of the oldest American producers, says it is manufacturing roughly 80,000 new guitars a year for example), and while they still do some short-term air-seasoning, they’ve had to add kilns to the mix in order to keep up with production. The wood itself has also changed over the years, and the old stuff has developed an unforeseen value because of modern environmental regulations. Until the 1960s most manufacturers used Brazilian rosewood or Adirondack spruce—both of which became heavily deforested in the 1970s and ’80s (though, as Gruhn is quick to note, the production of furniture and paper rather than guitars accounts for most of the devastation). Brazilian rosewood is one of the most protected species in the world, appearing on on Appendix 1 of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). “Even to import or export a used guitar made of Brazilian rosewood, you have to get a CITES exemption certificate,” Gruhn lamented. This strict regulation adds to the price tag of Brazilian rosewood guitars. Adirondack spruce, on the other hand, is a cheap wood still used to make paper pulp and furniture, and stocks of spruce may decline in coming years. The possible psychological reasons for the value of vintage guitars are less easily verified but equally interesting. “People tend to buy instruments because they really want them—not because they’re a necessity,” Gruhn said. “Mommy and Daddy don’t usually push you into guitar lessons,” he said. The instrument becomes a symbol of independence and desire. A guitar is also the “ultimate piece of art,” he said: “You can touch it, you can see it, but you can also hear it. And each musician who plays it has a different touch and reacts with an instrument somewhat differently. A really good instrument will inspire a musician in ways he wouldn’t have been inspired otherwise.” ■ June/July 2005 www.plentymag.com
PHOTOS COURTESY GRUHN GUITARS, INC.
Gibson F-5, 1924, with original case. F-5s made in the tiny window between 1922 and 1924 are known to most collectors as the finest mandolins in the world, making the late designer Lloyd Loar a household name for any true string buff. Extremely scarce, these instruments have been escalating in price since they were made. Current market value: $135,000, minimum.
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HYDROGEN FINDS A HOST A new technology promises clean hydrogen produced in clean nuclear plants. Will greens go for it? JIM QUINN
T
he hydrogen fuel cell is the tech darling of the day. Clean, efficient, and flexible, it has the potential to resolve our most troubling environmental problems and energy concerns. Cars powered by fuel cells would provide the perfect blend of environmental responsibility and vroom-vroom ego boost (see “Hydrogen, Here and Now,” page 26). There’s enough hydrogen in seawater to
20 | P L E N T Y
produce an endless source of the ultimate fuel. Hydrogen-based energy is by far the most appealing concept out there for those of us who want to live the good life without wrecking the planet. But all this optimism is based on the hope that somebody, someday, can find a green way to produce hydrogen. The dirty little secret behind the promise of a hydrogen future is that most hydrogen produced
now comes from an icky, polluting process called natural gas reformation. Driving a hydrogen car produces just as much pollution and CO2 as driving a typical gas-guzzler. Unless somebody comes up with a better way, we’ll never realize the dream. That’s why energy experts are so excited by the progress of a team of scientists and engineers at the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory. Last fall they set a new world record for efficiency by producing hydrogen from a marvelously clean process that uses a trickle of electric current to coax water molecules to split into hydrogen and oxygen atoms. In response to its success, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded the team a $2.6 million grant to develop their invention. Here’s the part that’s hard to get your head around: the invention is intended to operate inside a next-generation nuclear power plant, which would be designed specifically to use the intense heat of atomic fission to produce prodigious amounts of hydrogen. The idea is to build a nuclear plant that greens will go for. “We’ve shown that we can produce hydrogen at commercially attractive rates,” says a spokesperson for Steve Herring, the lead scientist on the Idaho research team. The next step is to design a full-size reactor that could make enough hydrogen to replace 500,000 gallons of gasoline per day. The prototype built in Idaho, called a high-temperature electrolysis reactor, is no bigger than a paperback book. The federal grant will allow the researchers to create and test versions that are 100 times larger. The mechanism is a high-tech take on a classic science experiment that you might remember from middle school—the one where you tape two wires onto each end of a battery and then stick them in a jar of water. Tiny bubbles quickly form on the wires and then grow large enough to drift upward, creating two streams of bubbles percolating from the wire ends. In this process, known as electrolysis, energy from the battery splits water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. Unfortunately, electrolysis isn’t very practical because the hydrogen is bound so tightly to the oxygen. It takes a lot of electricity to split the molecules, making electrolysis too expensive to be an affordable source of fuel. The secret to the Idaho lab’s innovation is a superhigh temperature, which makes the water molecules much easier to split. Herring’s team made hydrogen from steam heated to a mind-boggling 1,800 degrees June/July 2005 www.plentymag.com
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“Nuclear energy is the
only nongreenhouse-gasemitting power source that can effectively replace fossil fuels and satisfy global demand...” Fahrenheit—the temperature of an advanced atomic furnace—and then ran it through a device they had made from a tough ceramic. As the scientists had predicted, a small trickle of electrical current coursing through a porous ceramic sheet was able to split the molecules, collecting oxygen on one side, hydrogen on the other. The team’s goal is to have the reactors ready to install in next-generation nuclear plants by 2017, the year the plants are expected to be built and in operation. Energy experts and environmentalists agree that the kind of nuclear reactors used in the United States today are not acceptable. Reactors like the one that so famously failed at Three Mile Island are too expensive and too complicated, and they produce too much nuclear waste. But today’s nuclear physicists say the experience gained from the mistakes of the past 50 years makes it possible to build reactors that don’t have such serious shortcomings. These units, they say, would be smaller, safer, and more economical, and would produce much less radioactive waste. A key feature of what are called Generation IV reactors is a built-in capability to produce huge amounts of hydrogen. That solves a problem found in all power
plants, regardless of fuel. One reason power plants cost so much to operate is that they run at full capacity for only a few hours a day, during times of peak demand. At other times—especially at night—much of their expensive generating capacity goes to waste. Generation IV reactors would produce electricity during peak hours and then switch over to hydrogen production. They would be designed to enable high-temperature electrolysis, using devices like the hydrogen generator developed by Herring’s team. A growing number of Western environmentalists say technological advances have changed their minds about nuclear power. The most prominent pro-nuke voice among eco-lovers may be Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore. “Nuclear energy is the only non-greenhouse-gas-emitting power source that can effectively replace fossil fuels and satisfy global demand,” he told reporters in January. Will a Gen IV reactor be ready in the U.S. by 2017? With a coalition of nuclear experts from ten nations collaborating on the designs for these new, advanced reactors, there’s a good chance some other nation will build one first. The problem of nuclearwaste disposal has almost stopped reactor projects in the United States and Europe, but Asian nations are in the middle of a construction boom. Currently, 30 nuclear reactors are under construction in the world, and more than 100 are planned. Most of those are in Asia, where governments have approved designs for reactors that are safer and more economical than America’s aging units. The first large hydrogen energy system may be built somewhere like Tokyo, Singapore, or Beijing. Still, all of this is years away. It’s possible that engineering challenges will prevent the development of clean, hydrogen-producing nuclear power plants entirely. Political opposition could prevent their construction. Unforeseen technological breakthroughs could make nuclear energy unnecessary. Investors might put their money elsewhere. But a growing group of environmentalists and scientists—including Herring’s team in Idaho—are predicting the future will be fueled with hydrogen produced inside clean, safe nuclear power plants. Replacing fossil fuels in the United States alone will be a massive challenge, Herring says, pointing out that the average American uses one gallon of gasoline every day. “That’s a quarter-billion gallons of gasoline [every day],” he says. “It’s important to make a dent in that.” ■ June/July 2005 www.plentymag.com
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WHEELS
HYDROGEN, HERE AND NOW
The hottest new fuel meets an old-school engine—and brings us that much closer to our zero-emission future. Evelyn Kanter
“I
ncredible” is how BMW test driver Alfred Hilger describes the H2R, which has been breaking records in Europe faster than you can say “car of the future.” He was referring to the power and handling of the 12cylinder, 285-hp race car—and the fact that this revolutionary ride packs a souped-up (but still street-legal) combustion engine fueled not by gas but by liquid hydrogen. Last fall the car clocked a world-record 187 mph, the fastest any hydrogen-powered vehicle has ever gone on four wheels. “Nobody thinks of hydrogen as a high-performance fuel,” Tom Purves, CEO of BMW North America, told an audience of auto journalists in Los Angeles in January, where the H2R made its U.S. debut. While other automakers are spending millions researching fuel cells, plucky little BMW—little, at least, in comparison with global giants Ford, GM, DaimlerChrysler, and Honda—has been pursuing an entirely different technology. Its shortcut could make hydrogen power available and affordable a decade before the fuel-celled competition. Now if it can help speed along the production of truly clean hydrogen (see “Hydrogen Finds A Host,” page 20), BMW will have created the ultimate green machine. The Munich-based company started out building airplane engines, so it knows a thing or two about getting machines off the ground. The H2R was conceived, designed,
24 | P L E N T Y
and built in an astounding ten months. Although the test car is powered by pure hydrogen, BMW plans to adapt the engine in its top-of-the-line 7 series to run on either gasoline or hydrogen with the flick of a switch—much as a hybrid shifts between gas and electric motors. BMW CEO Helmut Panke predicts its dual-fuel car will be in our driveways “within three years.” The company is much less candid about how much the H2R will cost. The question is which approach—BMW’s or that involving fuel cells—is more practical. “It will be easier for manufacturers to adapt existing engines than develop entirely new platforms for fuel-cell packs and components,” says Atakan Ozbek, principal analyst at ABI Research, a market-research firm specializing in the high-tech sector. But he believes fuel cells are more viable in the long run. “We already have transitional technology—hybrids—and developing another form of the combustion engine now doesn’t make sense.” Ah, but it does. Transitioning with pure hydrogen will most likely drive the newer technology forward while fuel cells are being perfected, as the pure electric car did for today’s hybrids. And getting to the finish line first has another value: “it drives people into showrooms,” says Mark Perleberg, lead auto expert at NADAGuides.com. Is Toyota complaining that it eats more than $10,000 on each Prius sold, when every publication
FULLY HYDROGENATED, The H2R and its unique fueling system could revolutionize driving in a few short years.
in the world has written about the car and the company? Cost is of course a main barrier to bringing fuel cells to the masses. Those stacks of miniature chemical refineries under the hood are expensive, adding a cool hundred thou to the price of a car. The price will decrease with mass production—the first VCRs in the 1970s cost close to $1,000—but nobody will predict how much or when. Right now more than 100 fuel-cell cars are being tested in real-world driving, through leases or donations to municipal agencies, at undisclosed prices. Meanwhile, the eponymous Hydrogen June/July 2005 www.plentymag.com
Car Company, based in Los Angeles, will build you a Shelby Cobra sports car with a hydrogen-combustion engine much like the H2R’s for around $150,000. BMW plans to get a few hundred cars into consumer driveways, most likely in Germany first, but fuel availability is the other hydrogen holdup. To address this issue, BMW has partnered with BP in Europe, and GM with Shell in the United States, to build hydro stations or to add hydro pumps to existing stations. Honda is thinking even more radically, toying with the idea of a dispenser the size of a washing machine that www.plentymag.com June/July 2005
will turn waste water into hydrogen, right in the comfort of your garage. The goal is for cars and filling stations to arrive on the scene at the same time. There is now a network of hydrogen-refueling stations along highways linking San Francisco to Sacramento and Los Angeles to San Diego, and the Washington, D.C.–New York City corridor will be served by the end of 2007, according to Jeremy Bentham, Shell Hydrogen’s CEO. More pumps are to follow in those corridors, and BMW has announced plans for hydrogen stations in several major European cities.
“Will consumers embrace the technology if they have to give up precious time to drive extra to find a hydrogen station?” asks Perleberg. Could you drive cross-country if there were no refueling in Nebraska? Here’s where BMW’s dual-fuel model makes sense, because when the hydrogen tank runs empty, you’ll still have 500 miles worth of gasoline to burn. ■ Evelyn Kanter is an automotive writer who specializes in environmental issues. Her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, Skiing and cars.com. P L E N T Y | 25
MUSIC
YOUNG FOLK, OLD FOLK “Freakfolk,” Balladeers, and the Dylan Mystique Tim Gideon
At once disturbing, sweet, and apolitical, the music of Devendra Banhart shatters folkie stereotypes.
“T
he next Bob Dylan”—what a terrible phrase. Can we ban it? As the stunning prose casually tossed off in his recent memoir, Chronicles, Volume One (Simon & Schuster, 2004), reminds us, there can’t be another Dylan. He is a singular lyrical talent. And just as he hates being called the “spokesperson for his generation,” young artists, legitimately talented in their own right, chafe under similarly misguided proclamations. Some of the latest up-andcomers to endure this moniker can be found in the burgeoning (and unfortunately titled) “freakfolk” movement, but the only thing Dylan-esque about them is their originality. Leading this pack is a young San Franciscan named Joanna Newsom. On her debut album, The Milk-Eyed Mender (Drag City, 2004, $15.98), Newsom established
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herself as perhaps the only successful singer-songwriter to use the harp as her main instrument. Her voice has been described as both shrill and childlike, but like many original songwriters before her, it is merely different, combining Björk’s delicate delivery with Cyndi Lauper’s range for a net result that is beautiful and distinctly American. And then there are Newsom’s lyrics. With lines like “This is an old song, these are old blues / This is not my tune, but it’s mine to use” and “Never get so attached to a poem / You forget truth that lacks lyricism,” she proves herself wiser than her 22 years, endowed with a poetic sensibility that is anything but childlike. Last year Newsom could be seen opening for a slightly more established young musician named Devendra Banhart, 23, a singersongwriter whose weapon of choice is the more traditional acoustic guitar. Perhaps the term freakfolk was inspired by the pencilthin, curly-bearded Banhart’s striking appearance, but his music is simple and disarming, more likely to send shudders down your spine and spook you out than to evoke stereotypically folkie feelings of peace and unity. And while he asserts that the “real inspiration for everything [he has] ever done comes from nature,” his view of the natural world is more that of a literary science geek than that of a crunchy granolahead. Case in point: in an ode to the animal kingdom on last year’s Niño Rojo (Young God, 2004, $15.98) Banhart mocks an albatross’s flying skills and implores a crab to dance for him before it “hibernate[s] and come[s] out a crab cake.” His vocal delivery is simultaneously sweet and disturbing, occasionally owing a bit to the early recordings of Marc Bolan (T. Rex), but generally indebted to no one—at least no one in popular American music. When asked to name some influences, Banhart responds not with Dylan or Baez, but names from the Tropicalista movement in Brazil: “People like Caetano Veloso, Jorge Ben, Maria Bethania, Gilberto Gil, and, of course, Oswaldo de Andrade, who wrote the great ‘Cannibal Manifesto.’” Of course, Devendra. If Newsom, Banhart, and other stars of the indie-folk scene have one advantage over Dylan, it is a healthy relationship with their audience. Sam Beam, the 30-year-old
South Carolina native behind the banjoladen ballads of Iron & Wine, has a rapport with his fans that seems to characterize the new generation of folkies: while he claims to write music for himself, without regard for how his audience will receive it, they don’t seem to hold that against him. Dylan was not so lucky. In Chronicles he explains how he tried desperately, but ultimately in vain, to distance himself from the late ’60s folk movement that he felt was pigeonholing him as an artist. Hounded by the press and fans for his disinterest in the politically charged folk scene, Dylan wanted to disappear—even Joan Baez, his former lover, recorded a protest song about his inaction, “To Bobby.” So he began using a weird, off-putting vocal delivery, assuming that the critics would pan the new records and he would get his freedom back—but this worked neither musically nor tactically, as evidenced by the critical acclaim lavished on Nashville Skyline (Sony, 1969, $11.98). It is hard to imagine the future Banhart being imprisoned in his estate by angry indie-rock fans, and this is the primary luxury the current crop of songwriters has: the new folk movement is not political. It is simply a renaissance of the singer-songwriter who produces awe-inspiring results with the barest of elements. Not that today’s fans are without their righteous streak: after touring Europe and the United States with two bands that he recently founded, Banhart “was blown away by the constant percentage of people who were horrified to see [him] ‘go electric.’” Still, he was never booed offstage like Dylan was; while the electrified Banhart gets the occasional sour reaction from fans, he’s not in the middle of some grave standoff between acoustic purists and evolving artists. So, to paraphrase Newsom, the fate of today’s freakfolkers and balladeers is as malleable as clay. They are armed with talent and graced with an audience that generally appreciates—even expects—change and growth. ■ June/July 2005 www.plentymag.com
GLOBAL WARMING WE CAN. The science is documented. The threat is real. But now there is a weapon you can use to help undo global warming: undoit.org. Sign the online petition supporting vital legislation, discover a few modest lifestyle changes, and more. To learn all about global warming, and how you can help undo it, go to undoit.org
BOOKS
OF PSYCHICS AND CYBORGS
The U.S. military’s paranormal underbelly and the future of hearing.
THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS BY JON RONSON (SIMON AND SCHUSTER, $23.00)
THE U.S. ARMY’S PSYCHOLOGICAL-OPERATIONS DIVISION (“psyops” in militarese), a branch of the services that trains our soldiers in the art of mind games, has devised nonlethal warfare tactics that include blasting the Barney theme song at Iraqi prisoners. Some former armedforces officials have also speculated that the division had a hand in the acts behind the horrific Abu Ghraib photographs. But in The Men Who Stare at Goats, muckraking British journalist Jon Ronson reveals that, ironically, modern-day psy-ops tactics are rooted in the philosophy of a New Agey ecophile and retired army lieutenant colonel named Jim Channon. And as Ronson shows in his riveting book, some of the other experiments inspired by Channon’s 1979 manifesto, the “First Earth Battalion Operations Manual,” are mind-blowingly weird. Channon’s vision for a kinder, gentler military includes uniforms with special ginseng-dispensing pouches; adorable baby animals that can be used to placate the enemy; and loudspeakers that “direct positive energy into hostile crowds.” Flaky as these ideas sound, high-ranking officers actually embraced them; Major General Albert Stubblebine, for example, repeatedly attempted to channel his psychic energy and walk through the wall of his office, from where he controlled army intelligence operations in the early 1980s. Ronson also tells of a top-secret Army Special Forces initiative—appropriately code-named Project Jedi—to create superpowered soldiers who could make themselves invisible and stop goats’ hearts with their minds. In the wake of the Vietnam War, Ronson explains, military officials were especially interested in devising new tactics to minimize casualties, so they were willing to experiment. Thus “Goat Lab,” which still exists somewhere on the grounds of Fort Bragg, North Carolina, was 28 | P L E N T Y
born. Its exact whereabouts unknown even to other soldiers on the base, the lab is inhabited by silent, “de-bleated” goats and people who take time out from trying to burst the animals’ hearts to “psychically spy” on foreign leaders. Ronson’s interviews with former Goat Labbers provide access to what he calls the “most whacked-out corners of George W. Bush’s War on Terror.” As Ronson illuminates those dark corners, it can be hard to keep up with all the characters he encounters; names and connections accumulate like sediment, muddying the story line. But each of his sources provides fascinating information, and his reporting is top-notch, with exclusive interviews from major players in the military. While their incredible revelations make it hard to believe that the book is a work of nonfiction, Ronson’s opening statement that “this is a true story” is upheld by his painstaking research. By the end, readers may be forced to conclude that America’s armed forces—or certain branches of them, anyway—have gone completely off the deep — CHRISTY HARRISON end.
REBUILT: HOW BECOMING PART COMPUTER MADE ME MORE HUMAN BY MICHAEL CHOROST (HOUGHTON-MIFFLIN, $24.00)
HARD OF HEARING since childhood, Michael Chorost successfully navigated his way through the first three decades of his life with the help of cumbersome hearing aids,
until the summer of 2001, when his inner ears failed him completely and he entered the terrifying world of the completely deaf. His particular handicap, severe damage to the 15,000 cell-sized hairs lining the interior of the cochlea, qualified him for a new technology known as a cochlear implant: a system of tiny transistors embedded in the skull that analyzes the sounds sent to it via a processor and a microphone. Getting the implant transforms him, in the most literal sense, into a cyborg—short for cybernetic organism—a being that is part human, part electromechanical device. With his ears powered by a control panel worn at the waist, Chorost discovers that “his hearing had not been restored, it had been replaced, with an entirely new system with entirely new rules.” The journey through ever more sophisticated upgrades and improved hearing devices turns out to be an occasionally mixed blessing. (A new, less ungainly apparatus, worn like a hearing aid, turns out to be “much better for fooling around” so that he can hear the language of lovemaking for the first time.) Chorost laments the possibility that the close and vibrant communities of the deaf who communicate in American Sign Language—“the best language in the world for joking and storytelling”—may well die out within another generation or two. And becoming a cyborg, he notes, “infects one with a certain rueful irony, because it overturns the blithe assumption that one’s sensory organs deliver a truthful representation of the universe.” The introduction of an alien device into one’s anatomy would, at first blush, seem an unpromising subject for a book-length account (a long magazine article might be more like it). But Chorost’s investigations and experiences take him into many intriguing areas—from childhood remembrance through ruminations on the nature of machines and the stereotypes of science fiction—and his prose is so sprightly and insightful that Rebuilt can readily find a place on the shelf next to the best of the socalled literary memoirs published in recent years. As a coming-of-age story, this is a refreshing alternative to the current crop of chronicles about indifferent parents, sexual confusion, and soul-searching trips to rehab. — ANN LANDI June/July 2005 www.plentymag.com
American ingenuity is everywhere.
Just not in AmericaÕs energy policy.
TodayÕs energy policies disregard American know-how and compromise our national security. America is a nation of innovators, but youÕd never know that from the plans that Washington is cooking up. They rely on yesterdayÕs polluting technologies and do almost nothing to free us from Middle East oil or create jobs at home. ItÕs time for a real solution. American technologies exist that could save millions of barrels of oil and billions of dollars every month. Go to www.nrdc.org and learn about an energy policy that strengthens our economy, protects the environment, and actually makes us more secure. Natural Resources Defense Council
www.nrdc.org
Experience the beauty of science at work.
Lands and waters today are being altered in ways that threaten our natural world and way of life. But there is hope. When you support The Nature Conservancy, you’re advancing innovative, science-based strategies that protect Earth’s beautiful places. So far, we’ve preserved 117 million acres. With your support, that number will keep growing. Visit nature.org or call 1-888-2 JOIN TNC. Lake Superior, Minnesota North Shore © Mark Godfrey
This message is made possible by the generous support of this publication.
11
Spring is here. Throw a picnic. Enjoy the finest in sustainable fun.
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FORGET YOUR CHORES $1,799 (amazon.com) Donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t spend a Sunday mowing the lawn; let your robot do it for you. Simply schedule a weekly program and then forget about mowing for the rest of the summer while the electronically powered RoboMower cuts your lawn all by itself. Safe, quiet, and environmentally friendly (it runs on batteries, and uses only $7 of energy a year while your riding mower guzzles gas), the RoboMower also mulches grass and leaves.
www.plentymag.com June/July 2005
P L E N T Y | 31
GREEN GEAR
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PLANE AND FANCY $8,900 (deastisdesigns.com) Colorado artist Giancarlo de Astis rescues retired airplane parts and gives them new life as stunning home design pieces. The Il Primo desk, sleek and aerodynamic, is made made from mahogany, glass, and the wing flap of a Fairchild C-119.
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Live bigger.
Certain emotions can’t be captured
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For instance, the satisfaction you feel after shaking ten miles’ worth of desert sand from your boots. On an Outward Bound wilderness adventure, you’ll meet challenges both physical and mental, and return with a deeper knowledge of yourself and the world in which we live. To learn more, call 1-888-88BOUND or visit www.outwardbound.org. photo © Leen Thijsse for Stockland Martel.com
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LEFTOVER LUXURY $88 (momastore.org) Milan is the home of Italian high fashion, but the textile industry creates a lot of waste. When Italian designer Luisa Cevese sandwiches scraps of lace between layers of transparent plastic, she creates a brand new â&#x20AC;&#x153;fabricâ&#x20AC;? for these one-of-a-kind purses.
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TOTE THE LOTUS $225 (tumi.com) High-end luggage designer Tumi makes a style salutation with its new Signature Collection. This chic yet functional yoga bag comes in six colors. Just close your eyes and say Ohm.
June/July 2005 www.plentymag.com
GREEN GEAR
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UD O L T OU
CALLING NAMES Set of 4, $48 (vivaterra.com) We can’t get enough of these multi-functional recycled aluminum dining table toppers—write guest names in erasable pen to use as place holders, put flower buds in the petite vases, or use the recessed centers for tea-light holders or salt dips.
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Plates $35, Bowls $30 (momastore.org) These eye-catching plates and bowls are press-molded from 100 percent recycled glass. Designed by artist Silvia Garcia, they will make a stunning addition to your summer dining table.
BABE IN SOYLAND V-neck $90, Pants $75 (piscottacashmere.com) Soft, silky and made from tofu, this glamorous loungewear, a blend of 85% organic soy fiber and 15% cashmere, is the ultimate in good living—good for the planet and sensuous to the touch.
June/July 2005 www.plentymag.com
Explore, enjoy and protect the planet
Be a part of the largest gathering of Sierra Club members in history!
Come to Sierra Summit 2005
The Sierra Club’s first-ever national environmental convention and exposition September 8-11, 2005 The Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA
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June/July 2005 www.plentymag.com
Š2003 Sea Turtle Restoration Project
To find out how you can help save the Pacific Leatherback Sea Turtle from extinction, visit savetheleatherback.com.
Paradise KEVIN SCHAFER
Retained
The Galápagos Islands have long been a bellwether for the ecological health of the planet. Now, 170 years after Charles Darwin’s famous expedition, the travelers who follow in his footsteps could obliterate the fragile beauty of this naturalists’ mecca. Or they could rescue it. BY SARAH ROSE www.plentymag.com June/July 2005
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PARADISE RETAINED ON A MID-OCTOBER EVENING, when the New England autumn colors have been showing off and the afternoons are getting dimmer by the day, the board members of the Galápagos Conservation Fund gather at a restaurant in Connecticut. Enjoying wine and the company of like-minded colleagues, the award-winning nature photographer Tui De Roy throws down a gauntlet. “The barflies on a ship who never leave the bar, who never go ashore, who just listen to other travelers’ stories are, ecologically, the most sustainable tourists on earth,” De Roy proclaims to the table of scientists, former government officials, conservationists, and tourism operators. “Barflies leave no footprint at all.” It is an old conservation warhorse: to protect the world’s treasures, people must be kept away—the Mona Lisa is behind glass, after all. But an agitated Sven Lindblad, CEO of one of Galapagos’ leading travel companies and host of the GCF meeting, responds to De Roy’s remark with an expletive. “When we have a traveler in our hands, we have a singular opportunity, a rare chance, to create an advocate for Galápagos.” Lindblad says. He argues that if tourists don’t get out and explore, if they don’t have educated guides to help interpret the landscape, if they are not personally engaged, then they will have no sense of ambassadorship. “To further conservation, people must passionately believe in their soul that it matters. And if they haven’t left the bar, they won’t. Then we’ve failed.” Lindblad makes a declaration to the group, a new mantra for environmentalism, one reminiscent of Gordon Gekko’s dictum in greedier times: Tourism is good.
Blue footed Boobies, circus freaks of the natural world
INTRUDING ON EDEN The Galápagos archipelago is among the most charismatic ecological destinations on earth. Lying 600 miles off the coast of Ecuador, it comprises about a dozen islands, some huge, some minuscule, all the tips of volcanoes that have erupted in the past 5 million years. The islands lie directly on the equator, so they are hot, dry, and, for lack of fresh water, nearly deserted. They are dramatic landscapes, volcanic castles of cliffs, lava flows, and ocean, but it is the islands’ inhabitants that draw global raves. In Galápagos, animals are rock stars. The fauna are friendlier than your neighbors. Sea lions stare directly into your mask while you snorkel with sea turtles, penguins, and giant manta rays. Later, while sunning on the beach, you may find that same sea lion has cuddled up beside you for a snooze. The birds, brilliantly and bizarrely festooned, are so close and so fearless they will sing right into your ear. There are rainbow-colored giant iguanas. And when you sail into the sunset, whales and dolphins frolic in your bow-waves. Galápagos is a rare, unspoiled, and magical destination, the kind of place where visitors feel intensely sorry for themselves when they have to leave. And they are not permitted to stay. This year 100,000 tourists will visit the Galápagos Islands, bringing millions of necessary dollars for conservation. But they are sightseeing in one of the most delicate places on the earth. Travelers can 42 | P L E N T Y
Roca Redonda, an eroded cinder cone, at sunrise
June/July 2005 www.plentymag.com
The volcanic moonscape of Bartolomé Island
PHOTOS OPPOSITE PAGE: SARAH ROSE; THIS PAGE: KEVIN SCHAFER
The Galápagos archipelago is the most charismatic ecological destination on earth
PARADISE RETAINED A midday snooze with sea lions
In Galรกpagos, animals are rock stars
PHOTO OPPOSITE: LIZ CARTWRIGHT; THIS PAGE: TUI DE ROY
Marine Iguana in Blue
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PARADISE RETAINED introduce unwanted alien species to Galápagos if they have seeds clinging to their clothing or tennis shoes; sandal-footed visitors unwittingly tread on the mating grounds of rare, endemic animals. Despite concentrated government and scientific efforts to manage tourism in Galápagos, its rise, up from 45,000 visitors in 2000, is sure to leave an impact. Galápagos needs the world to visit to ensure its survival, but it could be destroyed if the world gets too close.
A sea turtle ashore at Pinnacle Rock
Islands often produce the circus freaks of the natural world, the dwarfs and the giants, the birds with blue feet and the 500-pound tortoises. The Galápagos Islands are geological babies, younger than South America by several ice ages, and they are oceanic; there has never been any bridge from the archipelago to the continent. Despite the youth and isolation of the Galápagos, thousands of species found their way there and adapted to the conditions: wind blew seeds and seabirds to the islands; seeds and bugs nestled in the feathers or scat of birds; and land critters arrived on floating rafts, hitchhikers on flotsam and jetsam. Because the islands of Galápagos are small and remote, the pace of change is so swift it is almost visible to the human eye—well, to Darwin’s eye, anyway. When Darwin sailed to Galápagos as a passenger aboard the 90foot sloop HMS Beagle in 1835, he had the sense that he was witnessing change as he traveled from island to island, that members of the same species were subtly different from place to place. In Galápagos, at age 24, Darwin had bumped up against the idea of evolution. “I was informed that many of the islands possess trees and plants which do not occur on the others...it never occurred to me, that the productions of islands only a few miles apart, and placed under the same physical conditions, would be dissimilar,” wrote Darwin in his Journal of Researches (1839), known today as The Voyage of the Beagle. Inhabitants told Darwin they could identify which island a giant tortoise came from by the shape of its shell. He measured the beaks of finches and saw variation in the size and shape of the only tools birds had to crack open seeds. He suspected that birds of different islands had differently shaped beaks because they had adapted to slight variations in conditions. Twenty years later, out of those same Galápagos-born observations, Darwin wrote On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859). Darwin’s theory of evolution is among the greatest explanatory models the world has ever known; Galápagos is a living museum to the great man’s argument, a touchstone of our shared cultural and scientific heritage. To travel in Galápagos is to watch Darwin’s ideas take shape, as if one had sat down to watch Shakespeare write.
THE BIRTH OF ECOTOURISM Galápagos is so dazzling as to be an obvious tourist destination—it is both physically striking and intellectually momentous. But beyond this, it is one of the most effectively managed spots on the earth. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) and government agencies work in partnership to ensure the islands’ ecological safekeeping. In 1998 the constitution of Ecuador was rewritten to accommodate the special needs of the country’s most profitable province. Two separate entities direct the conservation of the archipelago: the Galápagos National Park and the Charles Darwin Foundation and Research Station (CDF). Some 97 percent of the land in Galápagos is 46 | P L E N T Y
designated a national park—the remaining 3 percent is inhabited— and the national park serves as the administrative body for conservation, responsible for removing feral goats and pigs, policing illegal fishing, and training field guides for tourists. Scientific research in the Galápagos is channeled through the CDF, a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization charged, in part, with monitoring the health of the islands and advising the park on environmental policy. “I was at the station in the ’60s when we decided Galápagos should have tourism but that it should be tightly controlled and closely monitored,” says Peter Kramer, president of the CDF. When Kramer first started conducting research in the islands, the only way to get there was aboard the monthly sailing of a mail boat—a far cry from today’s daily flights to Baltra Island. Tourism is a nonextractive means of economic development, unlike industries such as fishing or mining. Tourism demands the preservation of a place in order for it to be profitable in the long run. Jointly, the stakeholders in Galápagos—the scientists, government, tourism operators, and local businesses—have a say in the management of their shared resource. Galápagos is a model for what has become known as ecotourism. Ecotourism is a new word that garnered a lot of attention in the mid-1990s, yet few people seem to know what it means. The International Ecotourism Society (TIES) defines ecotourism as “responsible travel to natural areas that conserves the environment and improves the well-being of local people.” Unpacking that sentence, the first two elements sound like common–sense. First, travelers should engage with the natural beauty of a place. Second, they should be mindful of adversely affecting the destination—or follow some alternate version of a “leave no trace, take only memories, tread lightly, do no harm” philosophy. But the third part of the TIES definition, “improves the well-being of local people,” might come as a shock to some. It suggests that travelers in fact should leave a footprint—a positive one. But just how the do-gooding might be accomplished is wide open to debate. To others the third part might sound vaguely colonial—as in, who are these foreigners to decide what the well-being of the locals is anyway? “Ecotourism has just not been democratically done,” says Ron Mader, founder of Planeta.com, an award-winning travel Web site on which the word ecotourism was first coined. “These organizations aren’t working toward grassroots environmental concerns. They have all their meetings behind closed doors.” The ecological needs of a mountain village are different from those of deserted tropical islands, and different still from Antarctica’s, says Mader. “This one-size-fits-all notion of conscientious travel will turn sustainable tourism into a bankrupt idea.” June/July 2005 www.plentymag.com
PHOTO THIS PAGE: KEVIN SCHAFER; PAGE TOP: TUI DE ROY; BOTTOM: SVEN-OLOF LINDBLAD
DARWIN AT THE HOT SPOT
The Great Frigatebird showing off
Galรกpagos needs the world to visit to ensure its survival, but it could be destroyed if the world gets too close.
The multi-colored glory of the Marine Iguana
PARADISE RETAINED If Lindblad Expeditions, a New York–based travel company, were its own country, the Republic of Lindblad would be the fourth largest exporter of visitors to Galápagos (behind the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany). Aboard two luxuriously decked-out ships, Lindblad ferries more than 3,000 visitors a year around the islands on a one-week cruise. Every Thursday night, on a guest’s pillow, placed beside the Ecuadorean hand-made chocolates, there is an invitation. Sven Lindblad invites his guests to “participate in the conservation of Galápagos.” Travelers are asked to donate to the Galápagos Conservation Fund, a nonprofit that channels donations to the national park, the CDF, local development projects, emergency funds, and education. For a donation of $250 per person, Lindblad offers a travel voucher good for $250 toward a future booking with the company, but many travelers give much more. In eight years the fund has raised more than $2.5 million dollars for conservation, and it expects to raise $400,000 this year. “Galápagos is one of the most exciting destinations in the world, and yet the Darwin Foundation goes out begging,” Lindblad says. The CDF receives around 30 percent of its funding from visitor donations, nearly 8 percent coming from Lindblad’s ships alone. Lindblad thinks the percentage of money raised from tourists should be much higher: “If I were the CDF, I would invest millions in training the tourism operators on how to raise the money to support [the CDF’s] work.” His is a fund-raising model that ought to be reproduced. In the middle of the week-long trip, the expedition leaders pass the hat to a
Sven-Olof Lindblad, President, Lindblad Expeditions
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captive audience. The pitch for the Galápagos Conservation Fund comes during the daily briefing, at a time when the guests are still engaged with the riddles of Galápagos—the flightless cormorants and the honking albatrosses—not on the last day, or a month later, when everyday life has resumed. “And the guests want to be engaged,” says Lindblad. “They want to be given the opportunity to give back. They’re delighted.” In the tourism trade, this type of effort has become known as travelers’ philanthropy. “It really puts meat on the word ecotourism,” says Roslyn Cameron, spokeswoman for the Darwin Research Station. Indeed, tourist behavior in Galápagos is so rigorously monitored, and the park’s policies are so strict, that every company operating there can legitimately call itself an ecotourism company, at least under the first two parts of the TIES definition. It is only under the third part, the world-saving part, that there is any room to measure or distinguish among the operators. There is little, if any philanthropic coordination among tour companies in Galápagos. The International Galápagos Tour Operators Association (IGTOA), a collection of tour operators, assesses members a per-passenger fee, donating up to $30,000 per year to conservation. Celebrity Cruises, part of the publicly traded Royal Caribbean Cruises and one of the largest cruise companies in the world, launched a Galápagos itinerary in June 2004, donating $25,000 to the CDF up front. As of April 1, Celebrity began an onboard program similar to Lindblad’s. While fund-raising for Galápagos has been successful, some complain that there has not been enough longterm follow-up for the programs that receive funding. “With ecotourism growing at 20 percent a year, it seems to everybody like such a good idea: development banks are interested, the United Nations declared 2002 the year of ecotourism, and money flows into sustainable-tourism projects,” says Mader, who estimates that as much as 90 percent of the ecotourism efforts in Ecuador have failed. (He did not have an estimate specific to Galápagos.) “There is a strong need to have better studies and better information about how well these programs work.” And though by most accounts the Galápagos model of ecotourism is a successful one, it might set unrealistically high expectations for elsewhere in the world. “A number of countries are embracing strategies of ecotourism as part of a larger strategy of economic development—for instance, they see opportunities if they create a park system,” says Bill Eichbaum, the World Wildlife Fund’s Vice President for the Endangered Spaces Program. “But if it isn’t successful, then the [investment in ecotourism] becomes a disincentive. If ecotourism doesn’t provide the benefits that governments anticipate, they might lose interest. Then there is a walking away entirely.”
“Tourism can be overdone. It can get too dense and attract too many people,” says Eichbaum
June/July 2005 www.plentymag.com
STEWART COHEN
TRAVELERS’ PHILANTHROPY
WALT DENSON
THE FUTURE OF PARADISE Galápagos is a worldwide model for conservation. Endangered giant tortoises have been bred and repatriated to their home islands. Feral pigs have been eliminated from the island of Santiago—the most successful eradication of introduced species anywhere in the world. (When pigs and goats were introduced to Galápagos by humans, they had no natural competitors, predators, or parasites, and so overreproduced with huge costs to the ecosystem.) A quarantine was recently developed to protect against future incursions of invasive species. Some 95 percent of the endemic species in Galápagos still exist there. And tourism dollars have been essential to every victory. Yet Galápagos still hangs in a delicate balance. “One pitfall is that it could all go wrong,” says Eichbaum. With 100,000 visitors a year and the arrival of mainstream travel brands such as Celebrity, Galápagos is reaching a critical mass. “Tourism can be overdone,” says Eichbaum. “It can get too dense and attract too many people—and that’s a real issue.” There are more immediate threats to Galápagos than tourism, however. Politically, Ecuador is one of the world’s most corrupt countries, frequently scoring in the top ten, according to Transparency International, a nonprofit watchdog group based in Germany. Political instability in the national park administration results in routine park closings, which cut into conservation revenue. There has been a long-running battle about fishing in the marine reserve—thuggish fishermen, in bed with the government, have gone head-to-head with the conservation community over issues such as longline fishing and the overfishing of sea cucumbers. Yet the most severe long-term danger is how attractive Galápagos has become to Ecuadoreans. There has been a gold rush from the mainland, with underemployed immigrants arriving by the hundreds, all hoping to siphon off a few tourism dollars for their very own. And though the 1998 Special Conservation Law curtailed legal immigration, illegal settlers and high birthrates among inhabitants continue to threaten the islands. The fragile ecosystem cannot possibly support a population that has ballooned to more than 25,000 from a few thousand in 1990. As the human population www.plentymag.com June/July 2005
increases, biodiversity perforce loses out. “The scientific importance of Galápagos can’t be overestimated, not just in terms of evolutionary thought, but in terms of our current data on evolution,” says Martin Wikelski, professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University. “Mostly because it’s such a nice little example of its own little world, really pioneering research has been done there.” “So many long-term studies have been done in Galapagos, studies on entire populations, that if there is any kind of environmental impact—say, an oil spill or longline fishing—we can detect it and act against it,” says Wikelski. “Nowhere else in the world do we have those baselines.” So what is to be done? “I would say there should be tourism in Galápagos, but that it should be local,” says Kramer. Kramer also works for the WWF, where traveling executives not only are required to justify the expenses of their business trips but also must submit an expense report on the atmospheric-emissions costs of their journey. (Jet travel has a tremendous environmental impact.) “Perhaps the ultimate sustainable tourist is the German who bikes to Oktoberfest in Munich, gets drunk, and sleeps in a ditch,” says Kramer. All jokes aside, a more locally based tourism in Galápagos would go a long way toward solving some of the region’s most pressing problems. Galapagueños rarely visit the park itself, and so rarely understand the splendor that is their heritage—or the costs associated with squandering it. They may feel they have little at stake in its preservation. Furthermore, locals are often among the first to notice illegal activities that might damage the park, such as fishing in the marine reserve. And if mainland Ecuadoreans, wrapped up in the dayto-day needs of a developing economy, became stronger advocates for the national park, they could pressure the government to look after its administration. While foreign visitors to Galápagos bring in money and raise global awareness, only locals have the potential to effect change from the inside—the kind of change that Galápagos, with her sweet baby sea lions and her monstrous volcanoes, desperately needs. ■ P L E N T Y | 49
raw food
I
DON’T TRY THIS WITHOUT A BLENDER BY JENNIFER BLOCK
am walking toward Vitality Lounge on the Lower East Side of Manhattan and, hopefully, toward vitality itself. My New Year’s resolutions are usually broad strokes—I’m going to listen better, I’m going to read more fiction—but not this time: for the first two weeks of 2005, I’m going to eat only raw food. As I pass a neon “Fuck Yoga” sign, I begin to wonder if this is a little extreme. Other than warning everyone I come into contact with that I’m giving up coffee, I haven’t done much planning. But then Anna McHugh sits me down next to the oxygen bar at Vitality and reminds me why I’m doing this. Like many of the raw foodists I’ve met, she says she feels lighter and has more energy, more mental and emotional clarity; she needs only a few hours of sleep; her skin is smooth and clear; she never worries about gaining weight. Most importantly, her chronic stomach problems disappeared. It is common to come to this lifestyle through sickness—ulcers, arthritis, depression, even cancer— and McHugh is no exception. “Raw food cured me,” she says. “It’s that powerful.” I am not chronically ill or trying to lose weight or more depressed than your average lefty. But winters keep getting harder—I hit the snooze button on the alarm all morning, I’m awake only after two cups of dark roast. And it does seem that I’m always warding off a cold. People with boundless energy, positivity, and glowing skin intrigue me. The basic philosophy of eating raw is that by consuming foods in their natural, uncooked state (this immediately axes all items that come from cardboard boxes, cans, and drive-thrus), the enzymes are left intact. Allegedly, those enzymes translate into pure energy: the body gets more bang for its buck, kicking into high gear and becoming more capable of fighting off sickness, repairing cells, and burning fat. People who’ve been eating raw for years look vibrant and youthful despite their age, sometimes unbelievably so. They say eating raw actually slows the aging process. I need a blender, McHugh tells me. Ideally, a blender, a juicer, and a food processor. Nut pâtés, soups, smoothies, and juices will be my salvation—one can only eat so much salad. If I were truly committed, I’d have a dehydrator on hand to make raw crackers, veggie “chips,” and “burgers.” “Going raw should not be about restricting,” she proclaims. “No diet should be. I mean, do you know how many things you can do with vegetables?”
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PORTRAIT BY FRANCIS MURPHY; FOOD COMSTOCK.COM
resolution
The author poses in the oven-free kitchen of New York raw food restaurant Pure Food and Wine.
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Before I go, she wants me to try a raw chocolate “cookie.” It’s quite tasty. She tells me the raw cacao might help ease the caffeine withdrawal. It’s a stimulant but also an aphrodisiac and the highest natural form of magnesium. She offers to sell me some, but I hold off. Instead I borrow two of her “cookbooks.” On my way home, I learn that I can make “pasta” out of zucchini, “cheese” out of pine nuts, and “rice” out of cauliflower. I immediately start concocting recipes in my head: for instance, “oatmeal” made from ground up apples, walnuts, and flax, topped with sliced banana and honey. Raw dishes, I’m finding, are all about the quotation marks.
The first three days are the hardest McHugh can say all she wants about not restricting, but within hours of beginning my first day (I cheat a little and start January 3), I realize that I’m steamrolling through the stages of grief. There’s fear: I wake up panicked, having dreamt that my fridge was raided, with
nothing left but the cold, white shelves. I sip green tea and eat my “oatmeal,” which is surprisingly good (denial, perhaps?), but within an hour I’m hungry again. And I’ll do anything for coffee. I think they call this the bargaining stage. By afternoon I’m sad—why does coffee have to be so bad for you? Why doesn’t McHugh have some raw coffee she can sell me? By day two I feel like shit. I’m tired and headachy; I’m weak and light-headed, even feeling waves of nausea. When I’m not nauseated, I’m angry that I can’t have coffee. Or sushi rice. Or penne à la vodka. Or french fries. I never even eat penne à la vodka. And I can’t stop thinking about the baked ziti I ate at 5 a.m. on New Year’s. I call McHugh for some cacao. “Oh dear,” she says. “Now I’m waiting for a shipment. Try me in a couple days.” I feel like a lapsing junkie. “The first three days are the hardest,” offers Shanti Devi, a raw chef, yogi, and “high-vibration nutritional adviser.” It’s day three, and I’ve been invited to her “cooking” class this evening. She’s making Thai “warming” food: squash soup, spring rolls, vegetable curry over coconut “rice,” and coconut-ginger “ice cream.” I spend the day excited for the meal, as my own creations have
MICHAEL KATZ
Pure Food and Wine’s popular Thai Lettuce wraps with tamarind dipping sauce
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been ultimately disappointing. “Linguine with pesto” was good, but I quickly developed an aversion to the soaplike aftertaste of raw zucchini. I normally eat one, maybe two salads a day, but now the thought of cold, slimy leaves is making me ill. I am enjoying my own successful version of “cookies” made from walnuts, flax, coconut, dates, and raisins, but something tells me these should not be my main sustenance. Perhaps they’re contributing to the frequent tummy aches.
Cooked food is poison?
Raw dishes are all about the quotation marks.
“It’s important to fast before you go completely raw,” Devi tells us in class. “You need to get the body back to a place where it’s able to absorb high-energy foods.” She recommends drinking lots of green juices at first—really, anyone who juices once a day will feel a positive change. Oops. While we’re eating the soup—amazingly light and tangy, made with raw squash, lemongrass, cilantro, lime juice, and coriander—Mike, my neighbor to the left, advises that I can make juices with my blender. It’s like he has thrown open the door to a dank basement and let the sunshine in. Green juices—in my blender? I know I’m a bit vulnerable to the power of suggestion right now, but I start salivating for spinach-carrot-apple juice. And I’m not usually one to drink my food. Like many in the class, Mike has just read Nature’s First Law: The Raw-Food Diet (Maul Brothers, 1997), by David Wolfe and others, a book that wins a lot of converts. He warns me that it’s pretty radical: “At the end of every chapter it says, ‘Cooked food is poison.’” I laugh, but apparently this is no joke. Later I ask Devi about this “poison” business. Does she really believe that? “That’s a pretty militant book,” she admits. What actually drove her to going raw was, oddly, life on an ashram. “I was already vegan, doing a lot of yoga, juice in the morning,” she says. “But I noticed that after a cooked meal, I’d just pass out.” She also had chronic yeast infections. “I had come across raw before, but this time it really resonated,” she explains. “And from where I was, there was nowhere else to go.” Cooked food isn’t exactly poison, she says, but “I definitely believe that the body is meant to eat fresh, living foods, food that is as close to its natural state as possible.” Beyond a food’s components—its minerals, fiber, and fat—is its aura, its “life force.” “Some people call this the enzymes,” she says. “These are the communicators that actually allow the food to be assimilated. So the minute you destroy that field, which heat does, the body can’t recognize the food anymore. It has lost the code. So the body perceives it as a foreign thing, and the immune system has to come into play, which taxes us severely.” She’s echoing what I’ve heard from others—that cooked food is what’s making us sick; that it brings about diabetes, obesity, acid reflux; the list goes on. I need more data. With a raw diet, especially www.plentymag.com June/July 2005
if you are buying organic, you eliminate not only all things cooked but also all additives, preservatives, and chemicals. You eliminate meat, dairy, and wheat; all trans fats and refined sugars. Does a raw food diet make you any healthier than simply eating well? Devi concedes the point—lightly stirfried vegetables retain most of their nutrients; a bowl of soup in the winter can be very grounding and warming. But she and others insist we can keep disease at bay with a raw diet. “Most of us are undermineralized and overstarched,” Devi explains. “Most of us have way too much sugar in our diet. Cooked grains, potatoes, meats, and sugars—all of these are highly acid forming. An acid condition in the body is what disease thrives in. So to counteract that, you want to mineralize the body, which is to alkalize it. Anything raw, with the exception of nuts and seeds, is alkalizing. And most alkalizing of all are the greens.” As I digest this, she asks me how I’m feeling. Not so well, I tell her. The tummy aches are normal in the beginning, she says: it means my body is having a tough time assimilating the foods. I should cut down on the nuts and sugars and up the greens, she recommends. I’m confused. On the one hand, raw foodists say that by eating raw, with enzymes intact, we give the body a boost because it doesn’t waste energy producing its own. But then why aren’t those enzymes helping me assimilate? Why am I feeling so out of it? I call Dennis Miller, a professor of food science at Cornell University, for some scientific backup. “Enzymes are heat sensitive,” he confirms. “But the question is, Do these enzymes have any health or nutritional benefit? There’s little if any research to support it.” Certainly diets high in simple carbs (refined sugars and starches) are associated with a higher risk of heart disease, he says. But will a raw diet keep disease at bay? Boost energy? It hasn’t been studied. Miller says there’s no evidence that eating plant enzymes would stop the pancreas and small intestine from producing their own. “There’s always a possibility, but it seems to me that the likelihood of this being important or significant is pretty low,” he says, adding, “It’s not really a plausible approach to eating.”
What are you eating? I don’t know if it was the two spinach-apple-celery-carrot juices I had today, day four, but something is definitely happening. I’m feeling much more human, stomachwise, and my skin is doing something strange. This morning I woke up to a bit of a breakout, and now my cheeks are so rosy I look like I’ve been out building a snowman with the neighborhood kids. Finally, I’m enjoying the creativity involved in preparing meals. It’s like having a new set of Legos. My kitchen counter looks like a chemistry lab. I’ve got oat groats, almonds, walnuts, chickpeas, and adzuki beans soaking in separate bowls. All nuts, I’ve learned, have enzyme inhibitors that are released P L E N T Y | 53
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by soaking for a few hours in water. Beans and other grains need to soak longer and then sprout. (Here’s why raw foods are called “living foods”—the chickpeas actually grow little tails. They’re alive!) The soaking and sprouting means it takes roughly three days to make hummus. Eating raw requires thinking far ahead; it’s like a chess match against your stomach.
Hooked on a smoothie
I can’t help but wonder what a super smoothie would do for Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Day six: I’m back at Vitality, this time with Devi. She’s among the cadre of advisers who are helping Vitality go raw—apparently, it takes a village. She’s helping me go raw too. She has offered to make me one of her famous super smoothies. There are five food groups within raw, she explains: fruits, vegetables, nuts and seeds, seaweed, and super foods. Super foods are spirulina, maca, raw cacao, tocotrienols, blue-green algae, bee pollen, flax, and hemp. I’ve only heard of about half of them. Each of these, I learn as she scoops them into an industrial-strength blender, have different properties: the tocotrienols are pure vitamin E; the flax has Omega 3s; the cacao acts as an antidepressant; spirulina is packed with antioxidants and chlorophyll; the maca increases fertility. “Easy on the maca,” I tell her. She scoops in some almond butter—fat activates the nutrients, she says—and then adds frozen berries, some water, and a dash of honey. The result is a deep brownish purple batter that tastes vaguely of chocolate, vaguely of berry, vaguely sweet. It’s not at all bad. “This smoothie is a meal,” she says. “It’s a happy meal.” Sipping (and chewing) on my smoothie, I chat with Alok, who teams up with Devi for a seven-day raw food–yoga retreat at a commune in Costa Rica. For Alok, going raw is not only a diet, it’s a way out of the “matrix.” He has a list of people who have returned from Costa Rica only to quit their jobs, go raw, and travel the world. “We are slaves to what we think we need,” he says. And he knows—he spent seven years as an advertising executive on Madison Avenue. His talk is seductive, but he also seems naive to the fact that his participation in the matrix is what gave him the resources to pull out of it. Devi joins the conversation, and we lament our toxic culture. I ask them about their friends, their lifestyle—do they drink? Devi says a glass of wine goes right to her head and, anyway, she’s drunk all the time. “Raw food gets you high, straight up,” she says. “People drink to forget,” says Alok. “I think they do it to connect,” counters Devi, adding, “Drinking connects you to your animal instinct.” What she’s saying is that she’s already there. I’ve brought my last two “cookies” as thanks for the smoothie, and I also want to know if anyone else besides me thinks they’re any good. “These are great!” says Devi. “You could sell these here.” Pull out of the matrix and sell raw cookies... As I bundle up to leave, Joni Mitchell’s “Urge for Going” comes 54 | P L E N T Y
on, and I realize I do feel sort of high, somewhat transported. Devi and Alok give me big, strong hugs good-bye, and I waltz out onto Ludlow Street singing. I stay alert, energized, and even inspired into the wee hours.
Maybe Hillary should go raw
I have a dilemma. I’ve made it so far—and my skin, my skin is now glowing—but this evening, day nine, I am supposed to attend a benefit at a fancy restaurant. Hillary Rodham Clinton is speaking. There’s no way I can go and not eat, and there’s no way I can’t go. I wish someone would let me off the hook. Raw foodists must be presented with such challenges every now and then. “Umm, I don’t think so,” says one cynical friend. “They live in squats.” But not all raw foodists live in squats. Demi Moore, Woody Harrelson, Donna Karan, Margaret Cho, and 1980s supermodel Carol Alt, who just came out with a book, are just a few of the celebs who are into raw food. I go to the event and allow myself to cheat a little with a colorful plate of grilled scallops and julienne vegetables that honestly don’t strike me as very cooked. (Back to denial?) I practically lick the plate clean but only pick at my entrée—overdone fish, overly seasoned vegetables, and a thoroughly tasteless rice-ball thing. I see what people mean by “cooking the life out of it.” I feel pretty much the same way about the keynote. The ingredients are good enough, but it’s delivered with no energy, no life force. I can’t help but wonder what a super smoothie would do for Senator Clinton.
Pure delight It’s day ten, and I miss going out to eat. In New York and most other cities nowadays, there are raw restaurants, but they’re not usually of the fine-dining sort. Pure Food and Wine is. Maybe that’s because it’s not run by raw foodists who became chefs but by chefs who went raw. Sarma Melngailis, who founded Pure last year with accomplished restaurateur Matthew Kenney, hardly screams au naturel. A former investment banker, she wears her hair coiffed and very blond, and her eyes generously adorned with black eyeliner and mascara. She and Kenney were introduced to raw food by friends who had a birthday dinner at Quintessence, New York City’s first raw restaurant. They were impressed and intrigued, did some reading, and decided to try it for a couple weeks. “It was very compelling,” says Melngailis. “Halfway through we looked at each other said, ‘We’re never going back, are we?’” They felt the “high” right away; and for the first time, Melngailis got a reprieve from her usually debilitating June/July 2005 www.plentymag.com
PMS symptoms. It soon hit them how profound the change would be on their lives as chefs. “We thought, ‘Oh my god—we’re vegan,’” she says. “It was like coming out of the closet.” For the struggling newcomer, Pure is an oasis. The dishes are satisfying re-creations of the fancy and familiar foods one misses, and they’re interesting, if not delicious to everyone: samosas made from coconut “skin”—coconut-meat dough, rolled paper-thin and dehydrated—filled with puréed cauliflower and served with a tart mango chutney; lasagna made with layers of thick, juicy tomatoes, creamy pesto, pignoli “ricotta,” fresh basil leaves, and sun-dried tomato sauce; an amazing white-corn tamale served over raw chocolate mole; rich, smooth hummus spread on crispy flax crackers. And oh, the desserts: apple pie, hazelnut “ice-cream” terrine, truly deadly raw chocolate ganache. Melngailis and Kenney are making it happen right here within the matrix. Their book, Raw Food/Real World (Regan Books, 2005) is coming out in July, with advice and recipes for those who want the health benefits but don’t necessarily want to quit their jobs and move to Costa Rica. And the buzz over Pure makes me think the raw thing might catch on among the well-heeled, taking the trend into the mainstream—which will ultimately be a great thing. We all need to be eating more salad and less crap.
AP PHOTO / KENT GILBERT
Raw foodists are kinda spacey It is day 14, my last day, and part of me wants to keep going. Mainly, that part of me is my skin. It looks and feels clearer and smoother than it has since the fifth grade. I’m truly amazed every time I look in the mirror. And in only two weeks, without even trying, I’ve lost the little winter padding I had. I’m also tempted to keep at it because I’m still waiting for that energy to kick in, that “high” everyone talks about. (Since the smoothie epiphany, I’ve been making my own version every morning.) But the same raw folks who talked up the energy in the beginning are now telling me it could be a few more weeks, possibly even months, before I feel it. After talking to Kena Custage, a psychotherapist and nutritionist based in New York, I feel better, less guilt-ridden about ending the experiment. “I do think eating raw creates longevity,” she says. “I just don’t feel that in our society it’s necessary to do it 100 percent.” Custage believes that foods transmit different energies, and that eating strictly raw means consuming only very light, high energy as opposed to grounding energy. “Raw foodists can get kind of spacey,” she admits. “And they’re often totally obsessed with it. I just think we’re here on earth to do bigger and more purposeful things than stress out over food. Life is also about freedom and joy.” She also worries that over time, a strict raw foodist might develop some mineral deficiencies. Custage provides the perfect closure for my two weeks. She lets me off the hook. I am definitely about freedom and joy, and I’m spacey enough as it is. Also, let’s be honest: there are only so many things I can do with raw vegetables. ■ www.plentymag.com June/July 2005
Raw food makes some people quit their jobs and move to Costa Rica.
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The economics of happiness, and why we could all use a little more green in our lives PLENTY ASKED SEVEN INTERNATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHERS TO SHARE THEIR VISIONS OF HAPPINESS. THE DIVERSE IMAGES—DEPICTING WIDE OPEN SPACES AND CITYSCAPES, SOLITUDE AND COMMUNITY—REVEAL WHAT’S REALLY WORTH OUR INVESTMENT.
BY JUSTIN TYLER CLARK HERE’S A MATH PUZZLE WORTH PONDERING: if the U.S. economy has tripled since World War II, how much happier are Americans for their material gains? The answer may have you reaching for your Prozac. In 1957, 35 percent of Americans ranked themselves as happy. In 2002 the number had dropped to 30 percent. Even more astonishingly, the same international surveys show that the Forbes 400 richest Americans are only slightly happier than the Inuit of Greenland or the Masai tribe of Kenya, which lives in dung huts without electricity or running water. So does this mean that money can’t buy happiness? Not necessarily, according to researchers in the boom field of happiness studies; it’s just that Americans are buying the wrong stuff. “We put 56 | P L E N T Y
A BIT OF GREENERY Peggy Sirota
too much into pursuing money at the expense of nonpecuniary dimensions of life,” says University of Southern California economist Richard Easterlin, who decades ago pointed out the discrepancy between economic and happiness growth (a phenomenon now known in econo-speak as the Easterlin Paradox). Instead of amassing Benjamins in our pockets and bonds in our portfolios, we should be spending our money on what will actually make us happier: “health and families and the environment,” Easterlin says. As intangible as happiness is, its level as measured on surveys correlates astonishingly well with a person’s likelihood to socialize with friends, suffer from psychosomatic illnesses, or attempt suicide. The survey data are also consistent with MRI data collected by neuroeconomists (scientists who study the relationship between brain activity and economic decision-making). Though looking at brain scans might be considered strange for economists, promoting happiness makes sound economic sense. Longitudinal studies show that happy people are more likely to become wealthy (and not simply the reverse), while depression costs the United States an estimated $83.1 billion annually in health care and lost productivity.
U
nfortunately, the upwardly mobile aren’t offsetting the happiness deficit. Getting richer and consuming luxury commodities produces only an ephemeral spike in life satisfaction, explains Cornell University economist Robert Frank, author of Luxury Fever (Princeton University Press, 2000). “The literature very clearly tells us that when everyone builds a bigger mansion, it just shifts the definition of what people need,” he says. Frank’s thesis is consistent with psychological research showing that people routinely make “affective forecasting errors”—that is, they overestimate how much happiness a salary raise or a new car will bring them. One famous study from the 1970s showed that the happiness levels of new lottery winners and people who had been recently paralyzed were equal after one year. Even having lots of options doesn’t make people as happy as you might expect: a 2000 study showed that consumers given a choice of 30 brands of jam were less likely to buy any than shoppers given only 6 types. That isn’t to praise dire poverty or Communist states with only a single brand of jam on the market. University of Chicago psychologist Ed Diener has found that Detroit’s street prostitutes and the homeless of Calcutta consider themselves some of the least happy
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people on the planet. Yet unlike their homeless neighbors, Calcutta’s slum-dwellers are one of the happiest groups on Diener’s list. Apparently, owning any sort of shelter makes all the difference. So what will make the difference for the rest of us? The newest cell phone? A digital VCR? While a rise in per capita income increases life satisfaction in developing countries, says Frank, societies whose median income exceeds $15,000 face a diminishing return of happiness. In the developed world, the reported emotional utility of an extra $1,000 in annual income shrinks rapidly, which may explain why Bill Gates isn’t constantly having an orgasm. (Speaking of orgasms, one recent study showed that an increase in having sex to once a week from once a month produces an equivalent amount of happiness as a salary raise of $50,000.) So aside from less jam and more sex, what makes people happy? Strong family ties, spiritual beliefs, and nature, says Diener’s research. According to Frances Kuo, an environmental psychologist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, simply being able to gaze at a bit of greenery has immense psychological benefits. Her research shows that views of nature through the window are reliable predictors of residential satisfaction, which is the second-best indicator of overall life satisfaction (the best being marital happiness). “And that’s true at all income levels,” she says. The faulty affective forecasting that inspires Americans today to work harder than ever before—a month more annually than people a generation ago—may also fuel the politics of unsustainable growth. In short, politicians promise wealth at the expense of happiness, and most voters buy it. “You hear John Kerry and George Bush telling us they’ll make America richer and safer,” observes University of New Mexico evolutionary biologist Geoffrey Miller. “You don’t hear them saying they’ll make us happier.” Not so in Bhutan, the Southeast Asian Buddhist nation whose king helped curb unsustainable growth years ago by supplementing its gross national product index with gross national happiness. Clearcutting a forest might raise the Bhutanese GNP, according to local political philosophy, but there’s no point if it lowers GNH. By comparing the self-reported happiness of villagers with that of city dwellers, Bhutanese researchers have found (after the fact) that the survey data supports one of the kingdom’s earliest assumptions about GNH—the importance of a clean environment. In the past few years, governments in Europe and Australia have followed suit, establishing happiness think tanks and academic publications, and hosting international conferences. Last fall happiness found its way onto the U.K.’s national agenda via proposals to limit urban sprawl, progressively tax conspicuous consumption, reduce environmental pollutants, and increase health-care funding. If such measures are received with suspicion in the U.S., it could be because until now putting a dollar amount on the satisfaction that the environment brings has been difficult. Economists have traditionally classified clean forests, oceans, and cities as a resource rather than a service. But if the visionaries of happiness economics are right, the environment is worth too much to simply be considered “priceless.” ■
June/July 2005 www.plentymag.com
THE IMPORTANCE OF A CLEAN ENVIRONMENT Doug Ordway
HONOR FRASER GOES BACK TO NATURE IN JOHN GALLIANO Peter Jacob
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SHELTER MAKES ALL THE DIFFERENCE Douglas Friedman
Instead of amassing Benjamins in our pockets and bonds in our portfolios, we should be spending our money on what will actually make us happier.
WE COULD ALL USE LESS JAM AND MORE SEX Nick Clements
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June/July 2005 www.plentymag.com
STAKE OUT YOUR SPACE Paul Treacy
THAT WILL SAVE THE WORLD FROM GARGANTUAN SUPERCOMPUTERS TO MINUSCULE NANOPARTICLES, GEEKY GIFTS FOR ALL THE FUTURE GENERATIONS ON YOUR LIST BY JUSTIN TYLER CLARK
T
he atomic bomb. The birth-control pill. The television. The candle. Crystal Pepsi. What do these inventions have in common? At one time or another, optimists touted them as the greatest of all time—a risky gamble, to say the least. In the 19th century, many scientists scoffed at the potential of the internal-combustion engine, even as they predicted that pneumatic tubes would carry passengers beneath the Atlantic. More misplaced optimism was lavished on Esperanto, Spam, the hydrogen blimp, the faxed newspaper, the 3-D movie, aerosol toothpaste, bottled water for pets, and, most tragically perhaps, Betamax. Laugh we may, but one day the joke could be on us. An MIT survey this year ranked high-definition television (HDTV) and voicemail as 2
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of the top 25 inventions of the past quarter century. One can only wonder if voicemail is as much an improvement over the answering machine as electricity is over fire. So don’t be pulled in by the hype. Historians often judge great inventions by how radically they transform our environment, but this age of unsustainable consumption ushers in a new criterion: how well does an invention preserve the planet? In amassing our own (but by no means comprehensive) list, we’ve left out pneumatic transatlantic travel. With similar hubris, we’ve passed over HDTV. We’re confident that what remains will matter 20 years from now. If it doesn’t, we promise to eat our hats. Or a whole case of Spam. June/July 2005 www.plentymag.com
PHOTO FAR RIGHT: ITDG / ANNIE BUNGEROTH; NEAR RIGHT: INTERACTIVE INFORMATION INSTITUTE, RMIT UNIVERSITY, MELBOURNE, AUSTRALIA; UPPER RIGHT: DESIGN THAT MATTERS, INC.
TWENTY GADGETS
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Library in a Box In the developing world, books and lighting are often unattainable luxuries—which helps explain why one in five humans can’t read. But an innovative new solution for reducing illiteracy blends cutting-edge technology and renewable energy: the Kinkajou, a solar-powered microfilm projector that MIT researchers are testing in Mali, is bright enough to be read in a classroom of 30 students. The projector’s designers expect it to reduce the cost of education materials in impoverished Africa by 60 percent.
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And What a View The world’s tallest man-made structure may look like a gigantic inverted funnel, but the Solar Tower, due to be commercially active in Australia in 2008, is an ecological masterpiece. Hot air collects under a giant transparent canopy— much the way it does inside your car on a hot day—that extends upward from the tower’s ground floor. Hot air, which has a propensity for rising, rushes along the canopy’s upward slope at 49 feet per second until it reaches the tower at the center, powering enough turbines to supply electricity for a town of 200,000 homes. The best part? The tower is most efficient on hot days, when the demand for electricity is highest.
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Zeer Pots In war-torn Darfur, Sudan, where starvation is a constant threat, raising crops is only half the problem. The other half is storage: staple vegetables such as tomatoes and okras typically last only two to three days in the hot, dry climate, and electrical refrigeration is rarely available. But Nigerian teacher Mohammed Bah Abba has found a novel solution: by packing a clay pot full of produce inside a larger pot and using wet sand as an insulator, vegetable vendors can store 27 pounds of their product for 20 days at a cost of less than $2 per pot.
Judge This Notebook By Its Cover Every day 6,000 of them become homeless in California alone. No, not people, fortunately, but the supply of nonbiodegradable surplus and obsolete computers warehoused by companies, in consumers’ homes, and in landfills. Computer manufacturer Fujitsu’s solution is a computer made of biodegradable, plant-based plastics: the FMV-BIBLO notebook, scheduled for release this spring. While the computer’s innards still pose a recycling problem, 50 percent of the case for the laptop consists of natural products, reducing carbon-dioxide emissions by 15 percent over the product’s life cycle.
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TWENTY GADGETS THAT WILL SAVE THE WORLD
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Fuel Cells Get in Through the Front Door Even if fuel cells aren’t in our cars yet, they will soon be in our garages. In February the Japanese company Tokyo Gas launched a home fuel-cell system that generates two-thirds of a house’s electricity needs by extracting hydrogen from natural gas, thereby reducing power-plant carbon-dioxide emissions. The system costs $4,000 at present—but it gives you a certain amount of energy independence, and the knowledge that you are supporting a technology with enormous green potential.
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A 20-20 Solution For eye doctors in the developing world, maintaining a full inventory of corrective lenses is not only wasteful but economically impossible. MIT doctoral candidate Saul Griffith recently won the prestigious Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for inventing a portable lens molder that can produce any prescription lens in ten minutes. Griffith also invented a pair of prototype goggles that automatically monitors the wearer’s eyesight and determines the correct prescription accordingly.
New Meaning for Hands Free Since the 1970s, urban visionaries have fantasized about cars that can travel on automated rail lines and highways. Spurred by skyrocketing petroleum costs and urban sprawl, the dream is back. In the past two years, Danish scientist Palle Jensen has built prototype tracks for Rapid, Urban, Flexible (RUF), a car monorail that travels at 80 mph. Toyota, meanwhile, has unveiled the Z-Capsule, a fuel cell–powered car that can travel on autopilot on dedicated highways, then switch over to manual mode (if necessary) on regular roads. Backseat drivers may soon find themselves unemployed.
Thirsty Thirsty Hippos Millions of people (mostly women and children) in the developing world spend half their day carrying water over long distances for their daily chores—an effort that, in time, becomes literally backbreaking. At a cost of $35, the drum-shaped polyethylene “hippo roller” makes it a breeze to transport 24 gallons of water by hand, 5 times the amount an adult could previously manage. According to manufacturer Imvubu (meaning “hippopotamus” in Zulu), the hippo roller lowers the risk of injury from landmines (by absorbing the impact of the blast) and contributes to gender equality—even young South African men are now willing to fetch water, traditionally a woman’s task.
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PHOTO TOP LEFT: TOKYO GAS CO., LTD.
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Thermoacoustic Chiller
The benefits of loud, uninterrupted sound are well known to fans of electronica and hip-hop, and now appliance makers are getting in on the act. Researchers at Penn State Applied Research Laboratory have invented a refrigerator with a built-in loudspeaker that uses 190-decibel sound waves (that’s louder than a Black Sabbath concert) to heat up inert gases. The heated gases are then converted into clean cooling power, without the toxic hydrofluorocarbons used in today’s fridges. Funded by the ice-cream powerhouse Ben & Jerry’s, the refrigerator can achieve temperatures of -4 degrees Fahrenheit, researchers report. So why is it so hot in the mosh pit?
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Like a Canary in a Coal Mine
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The midge, a gnatlike fly, is especially sensitive to the degradation of streams and rivers. Pollutants create modifications in the midge’s DNA, making it an ideal indicator of a damaged environment. Until now, however, getting DNA samples from large numbers of midges hasn’t been easy. Fortunately, researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have developed a nanoscale DNA litmus test that glows when mutations are present in the midges. If all goes well, the test will tip off scientists before environmental damage can be detected by ordinary chemical analysis.
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Crossing the Digital Divide
Don’t Try Sniffing This British scientists have developed a paint that actually makes the air cleaner. Millenium Chemicals’s Ecopaint uses nanoparticles—tiny bits measured in billionths of a meter—of titanium dioxide to break down nitrogen oxide (a smog trigger) under ordinary sunlight. The byproduct? Nothing more than water, small quantities of carbon dioxide, and harmless calcium nitrate. Trials using the paint in Milan found that it reduced street-level nitrogen oxide by 60 percent. There’s only one drawback: for the moment, Ecopaint is only available in white.
Despite the democratic nature of the Internet, computers remain unaffordable throughout much of the world. Nicholas Negroponte hopes to change that: the MIT Media Lab chairman is developing a laptop that sells for under $100. Using a relatively sluggish processor, a Linux-based operating system, and the same rear projection display found in televisions, Negroponte predicts the system will become as ubiquitous in the developing world as cell phones.
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TWENTY GADGETS THAT WILL SAVE THE WORLD
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Not Horsepower, Lung Power Much of the discussion of hybrid vehicles centers on fuel efficiency, but what about a car that needs no gas at all? Next year the French company Moteur Developpment International (MDI) will introduce its Air Car, a boxy six-seater that runs on compressed air. The surprisingly powerful sedan can achieve a speed of 70 miles per hour and can travel up to 124 miles after a four-hour fill-up on an air compressor in the owner’s garage. Critics worry that the car, like hydrogen fuel cells, merely relocates emissions from the exhaust pipe to the power plant; but as many of those plants go renewable, MDI’s innovation may prove to be more than hot air.
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Putting the Hydro Back into Hydroelectric With global energy consumption expected to increase 40 percent by the end of the decade, Australian renewable-energy company Seapower Pacific has a remarkable idea: using the power of the ocean to run a desalinization plant, then applying the excess power to generate electricity. While wave power plants already exist, Seapower Pacific’s will become the first dual-use plant, purifying water to quench a thirsty population and supplying energy to an even thirstier power grid. It is set to begin operating later this year.
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Making Popeye Proud Remember using potatoes to power lightbulbs in high school science class? Scientists have long dreamed of using photosynthesis to generate electricity, but the salt and water contained in plant matter corrode electronic systems. Scientists at MIT recently found a solution. By encasing ground spinach in an insoluble protein membrane, they have created a solar-powered battery that may one day run your laptop and cell phone—no photovoltaic cell required.
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Home Voltage Regulator Every happy family may be alike, but they don’t necessarily get the same amount of electricity. People living closest to substations—the facilities that control electrical-power flow and deliver energy directly to consumers—can have 126 volts or more flowing to their homes during power surges, even though most appliances require only 114 volts. Think of those extra volts as extra pressure in a hose that keeps feeding a swimming pool even after it’s full; if you can’t turn off the hose, the water is simply going to be wasted. So how do you slow down the flow? A simple device called a home voltage regulator. According to manufacturer MicroPlanet, the HVR reduces power consumption 10 to 20 percent and eliminates greenhouse-gas emissions by one-fifth, thereby extending the life of all our appliances—not to mention the planet.
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CyberTracker No, it’s not the FBI’s latest computer surveillance project, but a handheld device that allows park rangers and even ecotourists to report what they see out in the field. The Tracker, developed by South African conservationist Louis Liebenberg, has an easy-tooperate pictorial menu that allows users to record their sightings of flora and fauna onto a GPS-equipped electronic map. With the uploaded data, scientists have already been able to track endangered species and monitor the spread of disease in more than 30 countries—an environmental neighborhood-watch program for the entire world.
Breathing Evian Twenty years ago inventor James Reidy was pouring out the water produced by his dehumidifier when the muse struck: why not do something with the water he was pulling from the air? Now commercially available for just over $1,000, Reidy’s AirWater machine charges all day in the sun, then condenses and sterilizes 5 gallons or more of water from cool and moist nighttime air. Considering how much some of us spend on bottled water, it might make sense to start drinking what we breathe.
PHOTO TOP RIGHT: ROLEX AWARD FOR ENTERPRISE / ERIC VANDEVILLE
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Finally, a Meteorologist We Can Trust Last year the Japanese unveiled the world’s fastest supercomputer, so large it occupies an area equivalent to four tennis courts. The mammoth Earth Simulator Center can model the complex dynamics of the earth’s climate at a scale 1,000 times more detailed than that of previous supercomputers. By studying thousand-year cycles of ocean-current movement, scientists hope to be able to forecast storm systems, earthquakes, and tsunamis months in advance, and track the effects of pollution like never before.
www.plentymag.com June/July 2005
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The Latest Quicker Picker-Upper Cleaning up oil and tar spills is literally a sticky job, but Cornell University researchers have a new solution: nanosponges, or tiny molecules that scoop up contaminants in polluted soil and carry them to the surface. Chemicals called surfactants, currently used in soil treatment, work in much the same way as cat litter, clumping around waste for easier pickup. Nanosponges, however, can be pumped through the soil much more efficiently. And the best part is that they can be reused after messy cleanups. Try doing that with your cat litter. P L E N T Y | 69
OUR SUMMER PIN-UPS
s l r i G
! en e Gr e n Go
In a world of limited resources... a universe of infinite creativity
WAVE ENERGY
Ride the tide WITH WATER COVERING THREEQUARTERS OF THE EARTH’S SURFACE, IT’S ABOUT TIME WE CAUGHT SOME WAVES. THE TECHNOLOGY IS ONLY IN ITS INFANCY AND IT IS A LITTLE TRICKY TO HARNESS (AS ONLY A SURFER CAN TELL YOU), BUT THE POTENTIAL IS ENORMOUS. Here we ride on the ocean’s energy potential in a bikini by Red Carter.
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June/July 2005 www.plentymag.com
METHANE
What’s stinkin’ is smokin’
BURN Y BAB ! N R U B
LANDFILLS AND MANURE NOT ONLY STINK, METHANE GAS CREATES SMOG AND IS 30 TIMES WORSE THAN CO2 FOR GLOBAL WARMING. BUT IF IT IS COLLECTED IT CAN BE A USEFUL AND RELIABLE ENERGY SOURCE. We take out the trash in a striped bandeau w/skirt by Gottex; sandals by Born Shoes.
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HYDROGEN
Take me to the skies, and let me loose! THE MOST PLENTIFUL ELEMENT IN THE UNIVERSE AND IT BURNS CLEAN, BUT IF YOU WANT TO RUN YOUR HUMMER ON HYDROGEN, YOU BETTER CHECK HOW IT IS MADE. FOR IT TO BE GREEN IT HAS TO BE MADE WITH RENEWABLE ENERGY. THERE’S ALWAYS A CATCH. We approach H in a purple patterned bikini by Gottex; sandals by Charles David.
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June/July 2005 www.plentymag.com
WIND TURBINE
Do you catch my drift? THE DANISH LOVE THEIR WINDMILLS—BY 2008, TURBINES WILL POWER 25% OF THE COUNTRY. PRETTY GUSTY OF THEM! THE U.S. GETS LESS THAN 1% OF ITS ENERGY FROM WIND. ON THE BRIGHT SIDE, IT IS GROWING BY 24% A YEAR. Bikinis with flounce skirts are perfect for windy days; ours is by Red Carter.
d n i WMe Up!
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l e e FThe ! Glow
SOLAR POWER
It’s getting hot in here... THE SUN’S RAYS CAN HEAT OUR WATER, LIGHT OUR LIVING ROOMS, AND EVEN RUN OUR CAR. DID YOU KNOW THAT THE PAYBACK TIME FOR MOST SOLAR SYSTEMS IS JUST TWO TO FIVE YEARS? WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR? We go solar wearing a suit by Red Carter and sandals by Dansko.
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June/July 2005 www.plentymag.com
OUR MODELS ARE ALEJANDRA FROM FORD, JENEAN FROM Q AND STEFANIE RABEN FROM FORD II. STYLING BY ISE WHITE; HAIR AND MAKEUP BY WANDA MELENDEZ, BOTH WITH CODE MANAGEMENT. PHOTOGRAPHS BY FRANCIS MURPHY.
ELECTRIC NOW
Up, Up, Up and Away BEN FRANKLIN FLEW A KITE AND WENT ELECTRIC; IF MORE AUTOMAKERS BRAVED THE STORM, WE’D HAVE CLEANER AIR. Our foul weather gear is a bikini by Prada Sport and BCBG heels.
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G N I K C H O ts!
n e m p o l e v De
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Trashy
Treasures
ARTISTS FIND THEIR MATERIALS IN THE STRANGEST PLACES. REFUSE FROM DUMPS, RUSTED CARS, AND MATTRESSES FIND NEW LIFE AS “HIGH ART.”
BY ANN LANDI
ecycling probably was not much on Pablo Picasso’s mind when he stuck a piece of oilcloth printed to resemble chair caning to the surface of a 1912 Cubist still life and called it, all too prosaically, Still Life with Chair Caning. In the early years of the last century, he and Georges Braque had already upended 400 years of Western painting, destroying the notion of a picture as a kind of “window” through which we could witness events that seem to unfold in three-dimensional space. Now Picasso went that revolution one better: the real world was up for grabs. A short time later, his cheeky countryman Marcel Duchamp introduced the concept of the readymade, declaring that just about anything could be considered a work of art—a bicycle wheel mounted on a stool, a snow shovel, an overturned urinal—if the artist decided it was so. Few of us possess the wit or the ingenuity to find a bull’s head in the battered seat of a bicycle and its handlebars, as Picasso did in 1943, but as the artists featured on the following pages demonstrate, it might be worth thinking twice about the creative possibilities of humble refuse before making the next trip to the dump.
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JESSICA STOCKHOLDER
Jessica Stockholder’s exuberant, often sprawling sculptures developed in purposeful opposition to the experience of visiting museums as a child. Raised in Vancouver, British Columbia, the daughter of two English professors, she recently told a reporter that “going to a museum would put me to sleep because it posed the art as precious and fixed.” Her earliest work, from the late 1980s, consisted of found furniture transformed into strange and beguiling constructions through the addition of papier-mâché and colored lights aimed at the wall behind each piece. From that point, it seemed, nothing was offlimits. A typical Stockholder sculpture, which can range in size from suitable for a tabletop to filling an entire gallery, might contain plastic flowerpots, lamps, a swimming-pool liner, garbage-can lids, step stools, fake fur, and funky examples of low-end furniture. June/July 2005 www.plentymag.com
COURTESY MITCHELL-INNES & NASH NEW YORK
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Jessica Stockholder, , 2003, broom head, carpet, wood, aluminum flashing with tar, acrylic, and oil paint.
Jessica Stockholder, , 2003, sheet rock box, plastic containers, papier machĂŠ, plastic box, rope, fabric, circle of carpet, plywood, plastic vessels, bath mat, coffee table, and acrylic paint.
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TRASHY TREASURES NANCY RUBINS
Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1961, welded steel, canvas, epoxy, and plastic.
LEE BONTECOU
The constructions Lee Bontecou made from 1958 through the 1960s remain some of the most ferocious and memorable of that stormy time. She began by welding together lightweight metal frames to which she secured pieces of canvas and wire, eventually adding all manner of stuff—airplane parts, washers, saw blades, pipe fittings, industrial sawteeth, even a laundry-conveyor belt—materials she discovered on scavenging trips or purchased on Canal Street in New York, where one could still find army-surplus items in the 1950s.
Nancy Rubins, Small Forest 1, 2004, stainless steel and airplane parts.
He swiped a fender from a friend’s 1929 Ford and drove over it a few times to reshape it. 78 | P L E N T Y
JOHN CHAMBERLAIN
John Chamberlain’s moment of artistic truth came about when he swiped a fender from a friend’s 1929 Ford, drove over it a few times to reshape it, and fashioned the crumpled metal into a sculpture called Shortstop (1957). From that point on, the automobile carcass would remain his preferred material (although he has experimented with other mediums, such as kitchen appliances, oil drums, Plexiglas, and foam rubber). His coming-of-age as a sculptor coincided with the advent of America’s love affair with the car. June/July 2005 www.plentymag.com
PHOTO BY WILL WENDT COURTESY PAUL KASMIN GALLERY AND NANCY RUBINS
COURTESY KNOEDLER & COMPANY, NEW YORK
Nancy Rubins enjoys the distinction of having had one of her works— a massive wall of toasters and other discarded appliances—voted “Ugliest Sculpture in Chicago” (sculptures by Picasso and Miró tied for second place). A decade later, in 1993, her colossal installation Mattresses & Cakes stole the show at the Venice Biennale, and then again in 1995 at the Whitney Biennial. That particular piece, a bulging and bumptious agglomeration of soiled and stained mattresses rolled around hundreds of pounds of gooey confections, oozed a treacly smell and caused more than one observer to comment on its sweetly sexual associations.
COURTESY ALLAN STONE GALLERY
John Chamerlain Nutcracker, 1958, painted steel.
www.plentymag.com June/July 2005
P L E N T Y | 79
TRASHY TREASURES Chakaia Booker, Random Traits, 2001, rubber tire, wood.
CHAKAIA BOOKER
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COURTESY MARLBOROUGH GALLERY
Constructed from snaking, looping coils of rubber, Chakaia Booker’s massive wall sculpture It’s So Hard to Be Green earned her the title “Queen of Rubber Soul” when it was first exhibited at the 2000 Whitney Biennial, the nation’s premier showcase for new and emerging artists. After several years of making wearable art, mostly clothes and jewelry, Booker stumbled onto her favored medium while ransacking urban and ex-urban dumps in search of new materials. Discarded tires spoke to the African American artist in a profound way, and she has likened their varying colors—from steely gray and warm sienna to blue-black—to the range of skin tones that occurs in her race. June/July 2005 www.plentymag.com
He exhibited massive “tapestries” composed of clumps of cotton, rusted metal cans, and tangles of string and rope.
LEONARDO DREW
Though Leonardo Drew grew up in a housing project in Bridgeport, Connecticut, his mother plainly had big ambitions for him when she named him after the great Renaissance genius. The name proved prescient: Drew had to repeat the second grade because all he wanted to do was draw. He turned away from conventional mediums in 1988; in his first solo show a few years later, he exhibited massive “tapestries” composed of clumps of cotton, rusted metal cans, and tangles of string and rope. Along with hand-sewn canvas bags, reminiscent of those carried by field hands in the Deep South, these provoked powerful though abstract reminders of the history of slavery. In his more recent works—generally huge, gridded structures that hug the wall—he has incorporated broken electronics, plastic utensils, rubber tubes, appliances, and well-worn shoes. As one critic remarked, “They look like giant circuit boards torn out of some CPU of the gods.” ■
COURTESY BRENT SIKKEMA NYC
Leonardo Drew, Number 95, 2005, wood, rust, mud, mixed media.
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THE
GREEN IN PERFUME How to build a better rose BY CHANDLER BURR
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hen you next pick up a bottle of fragrance, give a second’s thought to the environmental impact of the Gucci, Thierry Mugler, or Dior you’re buying. Perfumes are believed to imitate nature—so what are the effects of perfume manufacturing on our natural world? Perfumes are made of scent molecules—single molecules or collections of molecules, synthesized by chemists in labs or synthesized by nature in trees, grasses, and flowers. The lovely natural rose and orange blossom essences in your bottle of Jo Malone are collections of hundreds of molecules, only some of which actually come from the flowers. Like virtually all perfumes on the market, Jo also contains cis-3-hexanol, galaxolide, and dihydromyrcenol—molecules made in perfume labs. Synthetic molecules are by no means bad; they are the heart of modern perfumery. The key to Chanel No. 5, for example, is a molecule called aldehyde, first synthesized in the 1880s. Shalimar, created in 1925, is powered by the synthetic 3-methoxy-4-hydroxy-benzaldehyde. Of course perfumes, like any other chemicals (think water, vitamin C, aspirin), have an ecological impact, and the fragrance industry must spend millions each year minimizing it. Synthetic or natural, it doesn’t matter—rose essence ends up in the air, water, and soil, just like methyl dihydrojasmonate. When JLo sells eight million bottles of Glo a year, she needs to worry about what they do to the environment because, besides perhaps feeling a moral obligation to the planet, she also has to comply with government standards. Likewise, Dior needs to ensure every molecule in Eau Sauvage is eco-compatible. One of the most popular perfume ingredients ever, found in some 90 percent of all fragrances, is linalool. It’s a molecule found in nature, so whenever you have lavender, bergamot, or coriander in www.plentymag.com June/July 2005
your perfume, you’ve got linalool. It can also be created by chemical synthesis as pure linalool (the first synthetic linalool was created in the 1920s). This is called a “nature identical” since molecularly, synthetic and natural linalool are—surprise—absolutely the same. Timbuktu, one of an exquisite collection of scents from the French house L’Artisan Parfumeur, uses linalool. This is a mesmerizing perfume; wearing Timbuktu is like waking late at night from a dream in a dark, ancient desert hotel made of wood that has been blackened with the smoke of incense and the smell of robed visitors, coming and going over the centuries. It is the smell of a character from Kipling. There’s linalool in Carolina Herrera’s new 212 Sexy, which evokes silk and the promising, powdery smell that hits you when you open new, expensive cosmetics. And like every other ingredient, linalool’s eco-effects were stringently evaluated. How? There are four steps.
STEP ONE: The majority of perfume ingredients are made by the perfume chemists at the Big Eight—eight international conglomerates: IFF (the United States), Quest (United Kingdom) Firmenich and Givaudan (both Switzerland), Symrise (Germany), Takasago (Japan), Mane and Robertet (both France). They make everything from aubepine, a raw material used in perfume, priced at about $1.75 per pound, to Basil Absolute, priced at more than $460 per pound. And a few fancypants boutiques, such as the French houses LMR and Biolandes, make fabulous products like Iris Naturelle, priced at nearly $4300 per pound. But these outfits do much more than make raw materials and scent molecules. The carefully hidden secret of the perfume world is that Yves Saint Laurent, Estée Lauder, and Versace don’t make their perfumes. The Big Eight’s perfumers do. An army of P L E N T Y | 83
goes well beyond Symrise in both rigor and breadth. RIFM’s more extensive environmental testing results are submitted to independent experts for review. For example, RIFM does environmental studies, or what’s called a Ready (the technical term for “fast”) Bio-Degradation Test. Studies have found that linalool biodegrades pretty quickly; it doesn’t hang around in the environment for too long before breaking down into something less harmful. Copies of the evaluations are then given to all members and published in peer-reviewed journals, and here a limitation could be imposed on linalool’s use. “Based on this material’s potential to cause skin sensitization,” its expert panel might say, “it should be limited to 0.1 percent of the final product.” Then this recommendation is codified as an industry standard by the International Fragrance Association (IFRA). Toxicity standards for the target species of interest—Homo sapiens in this case—usually cap out before environmental standards do. Toxicity testing is the stricter of the two and is generally the first to signal problems with a substance.
“I want the scent of a young girl swimming in a dark Mediterranean sea—and it should sell a million bottles in the first year.”
STEP TWO: When Symrise produces linalool and puts it on the market, the Research Institute for Fragrance Materials (RIFM) evaluates it. RIFM is the industry’s international safety and ecology arm, responsible for looking at the 2,600 materials currently on the market. The RIFM is financially supported by its members—basically everyone in the supplier-and-user chain, from Estée Lauder to Procter & Gamble (in its detergents, soaps, and shampoos, Procter & Gamble uses many times more fragrance than even JLo could hope to sell). This is where linalool gets much tougher testing, since the RIFM 84 | P L E N T Y
STEP THREE:
If Parfums Thierry Mugler wants a new fragrance, it goes to Symrise and describes the scent it wants. A Symrise perfumer uses linalool, combined with other ingredients to create a scent, it is called a compound. The compound goes through yet another evaluation, this time with all the ingredients together, since they may react with one another in unforseen ways. (Top, middle, and bottom notes come from different ingredients with different molecular weights. Benzyl salicylates are molecularly heavier; linalool is lighter; and limonene, from citrus oil, is superlight and so evaporates quickly, jumping beautifully off the skin.) Symrise cross-checks the materials with the restrictions of the IFRA and others worldwide for compliance, then sells the compound to Mugler with the safety package completed.
STEP FOUR: Mugler, or more precisely its parent company, Clarins, has the legal responsibility to do a final evaluation, either in its own lab or by sending the perfume to someone else’s. Clarins takes the fragrance compound it has purchased from Symrise and makes products from it. It adds to the compound an alcohol (to make it liquid), a lubricant (to make it flow), a wax (to add stability), polyethylene glycol, a UV stabilizer, etc. From these, Clarins creates perfumes, sunscreens, body lotions, shower gels, shampoos, and deodorants, all with the signature Thierry Mugler scent. Ultimately, Thierry Mugler’s brilliant new masculine B-Men arrives at the perfume counter in Saks Fifth Avenue. Created by the perfumer Jacques Huclier, B-Men smells like a field of spices in a forest of saplings growing under a fresh, clean, blue Indian sky—and thankfully, it won’t spoil any of them. ■ June/July 2005 www.plentymag.com
PHOTOMONTAGE CATHERINE COLE
chemists create the ingredients, and a separate army of perfumers employed by these same companies make the perfumes. Say Miuccia Prada decides she wants a perfume. She never actually lays a finger on a geranium extract. She (or more likely her marketing department) writes up a “perfume brief,” a concept of the fragrance she has in mind. The brief usually goes something like, “I want the smell of bitter apples frozen in a Chinese snow” or “I want the scent of a young girl swimming in a dark Mediterranean sea—and it should sell a million bottles the first year.” Prada’s marketing team takes the brief to Symrise and asks the company’s legendary perfumer Maurice Roucel to create the perfume. Roucel puts the molecules that the Symrise chemists have made or gotten from other suppliers into the perfume he crafts for Prada, and the Prada house then names and markets the finished product. That’s how the business works. Where does the environment come in? Let’s say Symrise, the company doing some of the most interesting work with fragrances these days, wants to produce and sell linalool as a perfume ingredient. A certain amount of this linalool is going to get washed from the bodies of the lovely young women who mist themselves with Gucci every morning, making its way down the drains of Manhattan’s showers and into the Hudson River. So Symrise needs to conduct tests to determine how much linalool is going to build up in the environment. First, the Symrise chemists look at U.S., European, and Japanese government regulations on required safety data. In the United States, you have to supply certain information according to what are called “thresholds of production,” which simply means that the more you make of the stuff (are you making one ton a year or 1,000 tons?) the stricter the regulations get. Symrise also has to test what the linalool is going to do to the ecology of the Hudson. The calculation is hazard + exposure = risk. The hazard is the toxicity to plants and animals; the exposure is calculated based on the amount of chemical you put into the next Chanel product. Symrise, like most manufacturers, tests its chosen chemical on fish, shrimp, or algae; tracks the levels of linalool in sediment; and measures its biodegradation. If linalool passes these tests, it can proceed to step two.
CUTTING EDGE
a strut
IMITATION OF CHRIST Organic wool dress
DEREK LAM Hemp/silk skirt; hemp twill trench coat
IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION In February, the nonprofit Earth Pledge and the legendary Barneys New York department store rounded up some of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hottest designers to create FutureFashion. The high-fashion spring collection, using eco-friendly materials, is one of the first of its kind. While beiges and browns may dominate its color palette, the line is full of luscious fabrics that are anything but crunchy. Props to these forward-thinking fashion houses for giving green its day on the runway. REBECCA TAYLOR
JEFFREY CHOW Organic cotton herringbone bolero with recycled Coke can sequins; organic cotton/flax striped tank; organic cotton twill shorts
ALVIN VALLEY Recycled polyester trench coat; organic cotton denim jeans
MARIA CORNEJO FOR ZERO Recycled polyester capelet; organic wool dress.
OSCAR DE LA RENTA Hemp/silk gown with IngeoTM corn fiber overlay
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PHOTOGRAPHS BY JEREMY FRECHETTE AND DAN LECCA COURTESY OF EARTH PLEDGE
Pink honeycomb bamboo dress with organic cotton, hemp/silk, and wood-pulp ruffles
FOOD
REMEMBRANCE OF TREATS PAST WHEN THE MEMORY LIVES ON BUT THE RECIPE IS LOST SARAH ROSE
BURN.
They crumbled in your hand and were overly sweet, like the airport variety. Three years past their sell-by date, our breakfast had been on life support in an overstocked deep freeze in a basement in Duluth, Minnesota. Trying to eat one, I grimaced helplessly at my mother. She stuck out her tongue as she buried hers under a napkin. “We will never taste schnecken again,” I said quietly so our gracious hostess, my elderly cousin Gladys, would not hear. “It’s been 15 years,” Mom sighed mournfully. That was how long her Aunt Lil had been dead. Lil’s schnecken (“snails”) were perfect little spirals of feathery yeast cake, with a caramelized vein of cinnamon, sugar, pecans, and raisins. The crust was crisp, the crumb was moist. A cross between brioche and rugelach, schnecken were home-baked genius. Cousin Gladys’s sweet rolls were store-bought and pedestrian. Food is a vehicle for memory; it is our first encounter with metaphor. A favorite food, a special dish, can bring back a rush of details about people long gone. Meditations on a madeleine cookie can re-create an entire lost world. My great-aunt Lil died at age 98, and, though we could see it coming, it had never occurred to us to write down her schnecken recipe. In the many years since, it has become a double blow—Aunt Lil is dead, and we have lost the keys home.
F O O D A N D FA M I LY “I really believe that food connects people,” says Jennifer Abadi, author of the cookbook A Fistful of Lentils (Harvard Common Press, 2002). Abadi had the good sense to make “cooking dates” with her Syrian grandmother Fritzie to learn how to make her favorite dishes. The resulting cookbook is not only a treasure for Abadi and her family but also a 88 | P L E N T Y
testimony to the cultural heritage of America’s Syrian Jewish immigrants. Abadi now teaches classes on how to work with loved ones to preserve family recipes. “It was a wonderful thing to do not just for the book, but because my grandmother is no longer with us and I have that time with her to remember,” Abadi explains. Not all of my Aunt Lil’s food is lost. Her bagels, for instance, were famous throughout the Iron Range. (The recipe starts with 15 cups of flour and ends with the sentence “This takes most of a day to complete.”) Her roasts and meat dishes are easy to replicate, and worth the effort. “I step into Aunt Lil’s house, take one whiff of dinner, and I gain five pounds and get constipated,” my father would say. We used to joke, none too nicely, that driving to Duluth was like trading with a third-world country. We brought up raw materials—cuts of elusive, good-quality kosher meat available in a big city like Chicago—and we left with cheap manufactured goods: frozen bagels, blintzes, schnecken, and kreplach. In the years since Lil died, my mother and I have reproduced every wonderful memory food but schnecken. Her bagels had always crowded out the lesser stars, the stepsiblings. Bagels were small and chewy, boiled and baked; they put up a fight and were unlike anything ever served in a New York deli. Hers are right; New York’s are wrong. With bagels on the breakfast table— and they always were—schnecken were the also-rans. It had never occurred to us that someday we would miss schnecken as if some light had gone out in the universe.
PRESERVING RECIPES A recipe can get lost in a thousand ways. Most often, says Abadi, someone doesn’t
want to give it up. A signature dish can be a point of pride, and people lose power or social standing when they divulge its recipe. Abadi had to fight her grandmother for information on the showstopper middle eastern dish Kibbeh Nabilseeyah, little torpedoes of spiced meat and pastry. For her Kibbeh lesson, Abadi was in the kitchen, ready with her notes and measuring spoons, waiting for her grandmother, but Fritzie kept dragging her feet. “No, I don’t want to. Nobody makes it anymore,” she protested. Finally, Fritzie admitted she had never actually made Kibbeh. It had always been her mother’s specialty—Abadi’s great grandmother—and she was too intimidated to even try. “It was at that moment that I saw her as a daughter, not just as my grandmother, or a mother, or a wife,” Abadi recalls. They rescued the recipe. Although Fritzie had never made the dish, she and her granddaughter tried making it together, working from memory. Sneaking a bite of the final product, Fritzie was transported back to her mother, who had perfect skill at shaping the pastries. “Jennifer, I can’t believe it: you too have the magic hands!” she exclaimed.
REVIVING THE DEAD My mother rescued schnecken from oblivion. She unearthed the recipe in the unlikeliest of places: Gladys’s house. With Lil gone, when we visit my mother’s family, we stay with Gladys. She has 3,000 cookbooks, all of which contain a variation on the theme of “Take a can of mushroom soup, open a jar of pimentos.” She has a peculiar fetish for food science. In her view, the invention of nondairy dairy products—margarine and Cool Whip—ranks with the polio vaccine. Gladys has Midwestern manners and insists on feeding people. During a recent June/July 2005 www.plentymag.com
BETTMANN / CORBIS
G
LADYS’S SWEET ROLLS HAD FREEZER
fainting spell, she offered cookies to the EMTs who were strapping her to a gurney. I would rather eat my canoe paddle than Gladys’s food. And I would never look to her for a recipe. But my mother, who knows the lineages, was inspired like a good archaeologist. Lil was the oldest of the 40 first cousins born in America; Gladys, while not the youngest, is the last one standing. “Gladys, do you have any of your mother’s recipes?” my mother asked our 98-yearold cousin. Gladys considered for a moment and then trundled out of the room. She returned with a clothbound notebook; the yellow cover had red railroad cars across it. In a forest of dross, Gladys had unearthed a treasure. Once upon a time she had copied out her mother’s best recipes. Gladys’s mother and Aunt Lil’s mother were sisters. Their mothers had learned to cook in the same kitchen, and the recipe was the same. My little brown snails of butter and caramel and raisins had been found. After the trip, Mom and I made them in Chicago. The first bite of our schnecken was as good as any we had ever had: rich, light, and sui generis. Aunt Lil had been brought back from the dead. And so had her mother. And someday, so shall I. ■ www.plentymag.com June/July 2005
Pecan Schnecken Makes 2 dozen 1 cup sour cream 1 package dry yeast 1/4 cup luke-warm water 1 cup butter 1/3 cup sugar 1 teaspoon salt 3 eggs, beaten 3 1/2 cups flour 1/4 cup melted butter For raisin filling: 1/2 cup raisins 1/2 cup chopped pecans 1/2 cup sugar 1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon For brown sugar syrup: 1/2 cup butter 1 cup brown sugar 3 tablespoons water
TO MAKE DOUGH: Allow sour cream to stand at room temperature for 1 hour. Dissolve yeast in warm water. Cream butter and sugar until fluffy, then stir in sour cream, salt, dissolved yeast, and eggs. Mix in 1 cup of the flour at a time,
beating well after each addition. Cover tightly and place in refrigerator overnight. TO MAKE RAISIN FILLING: Soak raisins in hot water for 15 minutes and drain well. Combine with sugar, pecans, and cinnamon, and mix well. TO MAKE BROWN SUGAR SYRUP: Place butter, brown sugar, and water in a saucepan Bring to a boil and cook for 3 minutes, until blended. TO MAKE SCHNECKEN: Remove dough from the refrigerator, and let it stand in a warm place, free from drafts, for two hours. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Divide dough in half. Place one half on a lightly floured board and roll it into a rectangle 1/4” thick and 18” long. Spread half of the melted butter and half of the raisin filling in the middle, then roll the long end as for a jelly roll. Slice the roll into 12 pieces, 1/2” wide; repeat these steps for the second roll. Butter 24 muffin tins. Pour 1 teaspoon of the brown sugar syrup into each tin and place a slice of the rolled dough, cut side down, on top of the syrup. Cover and set in a warm place to rise until doubled in bulk. Bake 12 to 18 minutes, or until evenly browned. P L E N T Y | 89
H E A LT H
TEN TIPS FOR A FIT TRIP
GET MOVING Don’t be an in-flight seat potato, especially when airlines such as Jet Blue offer both “Flying Pilates” and yoga cards that demonstrate how flyers can unwind and relax without a $5 cocktail. The cards display maneuvers like the spine twist and the roll down—which you can do without getting in the way of the beverage cart. Or bring a 90 | P L E N T Y
book such as Standing Pilates, by Joan Breibart (John Wiley & Sons, 2005), which offers more in-flight Pilates options and even suggests exercises you can do while driving.
FOOD THAT FINDS YOU Most in-flight food service has been reduced to chips, high-fat biscotti bars, or
processed airline grub. Many travelers don’t know that they can substitute airline fare for healthy meals that can be preordered and eaten on board. Services like SkyMeals offer delicious and healthy options for travelers in the Los Angeles region. Delivering generous portions and gourmet entrées like flash-seared ahi tuna with wasabi aioli, SkyMeals will customize meals for any dietary restriction with June/July 2005 www.plentymag.com
PATRICK GIARDINO / CORBIS
STUCK FAR FROM HOME? HERE ARE WAYS TO MAINTAIN YOUR HEALTHY EDGE. KEITH ROCKMAEL
advance notice and bring it to the terminal’s drop-off area. (Because of increased security, they can not deliver to the gate.)
SNEEZE FREE SNOOZING Because business travelers have such hectic road schedules, it’s important for them to get a good night’s sleep. In the past, travelers have lost many z’s because of allergies suffered from perfume– and detergentlaced sheets and pillows, but now more hotels are catching on. Hotel Triton in San Francisco leads the charge, cleaning all guest rooms and bedding with nontoxic, environmentally safe products. Fairmont Hotels & Resorts offers nonallergenic blankets and pillows on request, as well as hypoallergenic floors at their Vancouver airport location.
To help reset your clock, go into the sunlight and shake hands with the people you meet.
WORK IT OUT Fitness buffs can take their regimen to the hotel. Westin Hotels & Resorts recently partnered with Reebok to create workout rooms that rival those of upscale health clubs, with steppers, elliptical trainers, Cardio Theaters, and free weights. There is an aqua-yoga class at the Westin Maui and water Tai Chi at the Westin St. John. Those who need some on-the-road direction will like Hilton’s new personal-performance program, with which guests can access certified trainers across the country. Travelers who don’t want to leave their room can take advantage of Marriott’s three in-room fitness options, such as the BodyRev, a portable exercise device that uses the body’s free-flowing movements to deliver a fast but effective workout.
OPEN WIDE AND SAY SPA Those suffering from jet lag with some downtime in the terminal might consider visiting the newest airport trend—day spas. Biz travelers can relax the mind and body with a visit to an OraOxygen (Detroit, Calgary) for the ear-candling treatment—an ancient technique that cleans ears, can help relieve earaches and swollen glands, and can ease the ear pressure associated with flying. Those with limited time and residual jet lag should point their toes toward the reflexology treatment at XpresSpa (San Francisco, New York’s JFK, Pittsburgh), a stress reliever that also improves blood circulation. And those with even less time might consider the popuwww.plentymag.com June/July 2005
lar oxygen bars (at spas in Newark, Detroit, Vancouver), where a 15-minute oxygen session can enhance stamina, eliminate fatigue, minimize toxin buildup and intensify mental alertness before that sprint through the terminal.
CONQUER A DRINKING PROBLEM Staying hydrated while flying can keep you healthy, but as when in Mexico, don’t drink the water if it comes from the airline galley taps and lavatory faucets. Bottled water can be a good in-flight substitute, but the bottled stuff is not necessarily cleaner or safer than most tap water, according to a fouryear scientific study recently made public by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). Many doctors believe that tea can work wonders. Dr. Sonia Gaemi, who runs a nutritional consulting practice in Berkeley, California, says, “I would highly recommend making a healing tea with culinary herbs and flowers to keep you hydrated and cleansed from the elements, especially the air in the airplane.”
WHERE’S UP, DOC? Take a doctor on the road. TeleDoc medical services is a network of local doctors that travelers can consult 24-7 from anywhere in the country. The doctors speak with patients over the phone, and if necessary can prescribe medication or arrange for personal visits. Those who can’t maintain a healthy diet or
eating style away from home can use a Loews Hotels dietitian, who can (for a fee) steer travelers around hotel and airport menu challenges.
CREEPY CRAWLIES Airplanes are like giant petri dishes. Lower your chances of catching a bug by avoiding the pillows and blankets, which may also carry mites or head lice. Bring a portable mini-ionic air purifier to help neutralize viruses, bacteria, and other airborne pathogens. Frequent traveler and nutritionist Dr. Gary Null suggests using herbal oils and sprays as immune-system boosters. “I put five drops of wild oil of oregano under my tongue every hour in the air,” he says. “It kills much of the bacteria.”
EATING EASY Biz travelers with food allergies no longer have to starve while traveling. Restaurants like P. F. Chang’s are leading the way, retooling dishes and sauces for those suffering from gluten intolerance. The chefs provide gluten-free specialties like the chicken lettuce wraps and the wild Alaskan sockeye salmon steamed with ginger and a wheat-free soy sauce. Chang’s offers limited delivery in downtown Chicago and Austin and express take-out orders in all locations. Outback Steakhouse, whose motto is “No rules, just right,” has extensive gluten-free pickings.
MAKE NEW FRIENDS Flying over multiple time zones? Jet-setters can adapt to a new time by getting natural light and interacting with local people, say doctors at the Aerospace Medical Association, an Alexandria, Virginia–based think tank. Light and locals, you ask? A body’s internal clock is controlled by zeitgebers (“time givers”), environmental cues that help set our circadian rhythms. Daylight is the most common zeitgeber, but noise, social interaction, and mealtimes also trigger our waking and sleeping. Each zeitgeber impacts the amount of melatonin, a natural hormone, secreted by our brain. As the sun sets, melatonin is released; as the sun rises, the level of the hormone decreases. And the overall amount of melatonin determines the quality of our sleep. To help reset your clock, get your zeitgebers back in synch: go into the sunlight and shake hands with the people you meet. Then, when you’re tired, take a short nap—but nothing longer than two hours. ■ P L E N T Y | 91
HOW WE LIVE
YOU MIGHT AS WELL DRINK OUT OF A LOBSTER TANK IF YOU DON’T FILTER THE TAP. JENNIFER BLOCK
HOLY WATER!
S
ome wisdom for the ages: if you see something swimming around in your tap water, maybe it’s time to get a filter. Especially if you’re an Orthodox Jew and that something happens to look like a miniature lobster. Take it from the group of rabbis in Brooklyn who spotted a curious “bug” in a freshly rinsed head of lettuce spring 2004. While investigating, they recognized several more “scooting around” one of New York City’s reservoirs. City officials identified the translucent speck as a copepod, a minuscule but not microscopic crustacean (the giants are 2 millimeters long), and defended it as essential to the ecosystem, harmless to the thirsty, and uniquely present in the Big Apple because its water is so pure it doesn’t need filtration. Nevertheless, because the creature is of class Crustacea, and because of crustaceans’ ignominy as trayf, New York’s world-famous tap water—it’s supposedly what makes the bagels and pizza crust so good—was perhaps unkosher, and therefore unfit to drink. How would the Jews cope with the copepods? For some, it meant hauling enormous jugs of spring water up four-story walk-ups; for others, it was the business opportunity of a lifetime. “There were advertisements for water filters in all the Jewish periodicals,” says Rabbi Mordechai Etengoff, who oversees food preparation at Circa, a dairy restaurant in the heavily Orthodox neighborhood of Boro Park, Brooklyn. One advertisement had the motto “The bug stops here.’’ For John Menard, president of Metro Filter Sales, the busiest distributor of filters in the city, it was early Christmas: he estimates $1 million in total sales since last June, when the Orthodox Union decreed that all kosher restaurants must filter their water and that individual households should. Menard’s systems, manufactured by CUNO Aqua-Pure, which range in price from $85 for a sink unit to $2,000 for a building system, were specifically mentioned in a letter to rabbis. “We got some free advertising,” says Menard, who has since taken on cult status as the “filter maven.” These days, if you walk along Avenue J, through the heart of Boro Park, restaurants
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that might otherwise be boasting low-carb pasta instead post signs reading “We only use filtered water.” Some even picture their filters. Like Abraham and Isaac or the story of Job, is this a parable that we can all learn from? Menard is hesitant to smite the tap, but Michael Klein, a filter expert with CWR Environmental Products, supplier to some of North America’s preeminent health gurus, says, “Absolutely, positively, everyone should filter their water.” Chlorine, for instance, is everywhere. “All municipal water systems add chlorine,” says Klein. “I’m not saying it’s bad—they do it to disinfect the water. But you don’t want to be drinking or showering in bleach.” And don’t get him started on fluoride. “You can’t drink water straight from the tap. It’s just not safe.” Klein has a few Hasidic customers, whom he reassured immediately after learning of the crustaceans. “Our filters get them out 100 percent,” he says. “I mean, putting one of those guys through one of our filters would be like…” He pauses, searching for an adequate analogy. “It would be like putting the earth through a pinhole.” He makes it sound almost Kabbalistic: a whole world in every copepod. What about those ubiquitous plastic Brita pitchers? What would putting a copepod
through one of those be like? The answer for Brita or any other filter lies in its micron rating, the size of the smallest particle it will catch. For those keeping Kosher, it must be 30 microns or less. You won’t find any such rating on Brita’s Web site, but a quick Web search for a public-relations office reveals, unintentionally, that Brita is a wholly owned subsidiary of Clorox, as in bleach. Seek and ye shall find. “We don’t do micron ratings on the water pitchers,” says Lisa Henry, a Brita spokesperson. Brita’s loose-bed carbon filter is fairly effective at absorbing chlorine, but a filter needs more pressure than gravity to sift out particulate matter, even the relatively huge copepod. Filter gurus also warn that pitcher filters can be a breeding ground for bacteria. They recommend replacing the cartridges more often than the suggested two months, but at that cost you might as well invest in something a little more discriminating. As one would expect, Klein and Menard both extol the benefits of their respective products. Both Aqua-Pure and Doulton, the brand Klein sells, manufacture filters with ratings at a fraction of a micron, at roughly the same cost: $100 to $300 for a sink unit, $3,000 and up for the entire home. Both hesitate to generalize their advice, but one huge determining factor in filtration need is where you live, which affects whether your water supply is from the ground or protected reservoirs. If it’s from the ground, your biggest concerns are pesticides, herbicides, gasoline additives, and other chemicals—all suspected carcinogens. If it’s from a reservoir, which is the case in New York City, your worries are chlorine, lead, sediment, and parasites. Feeling uneasy? Imagine how it must look from the copepod’s perspective. ■ June/July 2005 www.plentymag.com
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SIGNS OF THE TIMES
The massive new CTX goes where no SUV has gone before, and then some.
THE ROAD TO NOWHERE THIS MONTH’S TOP PICKS FOR WHY WE’RE DOOMED BY PHILIP HIGGS AND HILLARY ROSNER
T
he road to hell may be paved with good intentions, but the road to oblivion need not be paved at all. Here at PLENTY, we enjoy driving our hybrids as much as anyone. But highways come with a host of environmental effects: damage to ecosystems, air-quality problems, and open access to formerly pristine areas. Will your carefree, summer, cross-country road–trips bring on the apocalypse? Could roads—and the cars we drive on them—eventually lead to the end of the world?
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ICY CONDITIONS AHEAD The National Science Foundation (NSF), which runs the U.S. base and programs in Antarctica, is building a road across the white continent, from McMurdo Station to the South Pole. The treacherous work involves locating the gaping crevasses in massive ice fields, then blowing them up and filling them with up to 318,000 cubic feet of snow. Referred to somewhat incorrectly in press accounts as an “ice highway,” the route is really more of a plowed trail marking a
relatively safe passage across the ice—all safety being relative in the fierce conditions at the bottom of the globe. The NSF hopes the trail will offer an alternative method of transporting supplies for research at the South Pole. Currently, supplies—including diesel fuel and heavy machinery—are flown around on a fleet of LC-130 cargo planes, a primary mode of transportation in Antarctica. The land route would free up the planes for researchers and could make resupply missions less expensive. June/July 2005 www.plentymag.com
The ostensible plan is to leave tourists and adventure seekers, whose numbers continue to rise, to their own devices. But—as has been noted by everyone from highway engineers to wilderness activists—if you build it, they will come. Josh Stevens, campaign associate for the Antarctic and Southern Oceans Coalition, the ice route’s most vocal critic, worries that once the traverse is built, the United States won’t be able to stop other parties from using it. The number of tourists visiting Antarctica has doubled over the last decade, to nearly 25,000. Travel to Antarctica is, of course, the ultimate cocktail-party trump card. “The guy next to you says, ‘I went to Hawaii,’” says Stevens, “and you say you’ve gone to a place that no one has ever gone to.” You are instantly the coolest person there. And while the NSF has said it has no intention of using the road for anything other than scientific missions, good intentions can be easily thwarted. Nightmarish visions of oil-company expeditions to the South Pole are enough to keep even the most amateur conspiracy theorist awake at night. “This particular government is not particularly good at saying no to [energy] companies,” Stevens points out. That’s putting it mildly. The Antarctic Treaty, the 13-nation agreement that governs the continent, prohibits resource extraction and contains strict pollution rules—but there’s no telling what will happen once it expires, in 2041, when the Bush twins are copresidents. The argument against the ice traverse is also a symbolic one: Antarctica is among the world’s last true wildernesses. Building a road across a wilderness makes it inherently less wild. Even if the crevasse blasting and the big-rig convoys prove to have no adverse environmental impact, the project is still an exercise in taming nature. And isn’t there already too little untamed nature left? The NSF is adamant that the route will not cause harm. Peter West, media officer for NSF’s polar programs, wrote in an email, “If the traverse route is deemed a feasible alternative to flying cargo to the South Pole—that is IF—it would be used to support scientific research in such fields as airquality and ozone monitoring that, in fact, have very positive results for environmental quality.” Still, the NSF drew ire for its somewhat strange administrative approach to building www.plentymag.com June/July 2005
Couldn’t care less about the future of humanity? Then perhaps the 24,999pound, 21foot, 7-mileper-gallon Commercial Extreme Truck is for you. the traverse: it filed an environmentalimpact statement only after completing two seasons of work on the road. Meanwhile, trailblazing continues— route completion was initially expected this year, but it will take at least one more austral summer season to reach the pole—and a frontier mentality harkens back to the taming of our own continent. An article in the Antarctic Sun, the in-house McMurdo newspaper, began this way: “On a wide, white prairie, a caravan of tractors and trailers halted and five men stepped out, holding wrenches and arc welders the way John Wayne and Clint Eastwood once slung guns.”
THE EGO-FRIENDLY MOVEMENT Bored with the pedestrian glamour of the Hummer? Enjoy a particular disdain for svelte sedans? Couldn’t care less about the future of humanity? Then perhaps the 24,999-pound, 21-foot, 7-mile-per-gallon Commercial Extreme Truck (CXT) from International Truck and Engine—the biggest
pick-up truck the non-commercial consumer can buy—is for you. It’s the size of a garbage truck, built from the same mold as a snowplow, and can haul a few Hummer H2s (or, say, a Toyota Prius or ten) in the back. And hey, Ashton Kutcher’s been seen driving Demi’s kids around Santa Monica in one, so you know you want your very own. Bonus: in most states you won’t even need a special drivers’ license since the CXT weighs in just under regulation for commercial trucks. As a Houston-based CXT salesman told Bloomberg News, “These are trucks for people with more money than brains.” It’s all part of a broader effort by International, long a maker of school buses and tow trucks, to expand the brand—contrary to popular belief, it was not an attempt to encourage global warming. Purportedly intended for construction and industrial work, the CXT is also being aggressively marketed to those whose biggest haul is their ego. The CXT is just one bullet point in a corporate strategy to increase International’s paltry $9.6 billion 2004 revenue to a more robust $15 billion within five years—by selling people five times more vehicle than they need for three times the price. (The starting price for noncustom CXT models is around $90,000; in-cab DVD players and leather dash are extra.) The CST, a lighter, smaller, but still Ford Excursion–humbling model is due out sometime this year. “This is clearly an arms race,” says Dan Sturges, a former car designer for General Motors and now an advocate for sustainable transportation. More big cars on the nation’s roadways results in even bigger cars. “More and more [commercial] trucks are dominating our freeways,” Sturges says. “So you’ve got a family in California just trying to get the kids to school in a Toyota Corolla; meanwhile, they’re surrounded by these big Mack trucks.” Which can be slightly discomfiting, something carmakers have been more than happy to play off of. “Everybody wants to be safe,” says Sturges. “Even some enviros say, ‘I want to save the planet, but I’ve got to save my kids first.’” But as the monster-truck set competes for bragging rights and the soccer moms fight for parking, the fossil-fuel reserves needed to fuel their behemoths sink ever lower and greenhouse gases pile up. “We’re a free society,” says Sturges, “so these celebrities getting these 10,000-pound vehicles are free to look like idiots.” ■ P L E N T Y | 95
T H E B AC K PAG E
MORE BRANDS NEEDED
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enjoy watching Melissa and Joan Rivers chat up celebs in fancy clothes at the Academy Awards just as much as the next person, but when I hit my own personal runway—the hard pavement of New York City—I can most often be found in well-worn sandals and an old pair of jeans. While I like looking at the high, I’m most comfortable in the low—at least of a sort. Despite appearances, I actually put a lot of thought into what I wear. I want to buy products made sustainably. But it takes considerable time to find those Tencel jeans that fit just right or that soy Tshirt with just enough give. People love to wear their politics on their sleeve, so to speak—including me. That’s one reason why the Prius has been such a success: because of its unique shape and design, everyone knows what kind of car you are driving. Have you ever seen a Prius with a bumper sticker? Everyone already knows who you voted for in 2004. On the other hand, hybrid Honda Civic owners need to advertise, as the car is indistinguishable from the regular Civic, except for a small label on the back. And this explains (in part) the relative lack of success of Honda’s hybrid. There’s a six-month waiting list for the Prius, none for the Civic hybrid. Eco-friendly clothing needs its own Prius—a stamp of sustainability. Then it might really take off. The sustainable clothing sector is mostly made up of a bunch of small players that can’t afford to invest in brand recognition—Patagonia being the major exception here—or niche lines from major clothing companies like Nike and Eddie Bauer. Nike, former industry whipping boy for sweatshop violations, is leading the way with an organic clothing line for women. Eddie Bauer produced only a token organic T-shirt, yet still bathed itself in a pro-green light with its major national ad cam-
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paign. Up-and-coming companies like Gaiam, for their part, need broader apparel lines to appeal to more people. The major clothing manufacturers should want to go green. If not for environmental reasons alone (like not polluting groundwater), creating a positive association with the environment is one of the most powerful things a company can do to strengthen its brand. If a company wants brand loyalty, this is how to get it. It’s easier to name an eco-fiber than an eco-clothing brand, yet brands are critical to the success of the sustainable sector. While there is a world of great materials—organic cotton and wool, hemp, soy, Tencel (tree fiber), and bamboo—not too many designers are using them. There are few things more comforting than being able to get a pair of Levi’s in the same size again and again, knowing that as long as you don’t put on any weight, they will fit you just like the last pair. But if you buy Tencel jeans from a different small manufacturer each time, the hit-and-miss nature of the shopping experience will discourage you from buying green. If a large clothing manufacturer were to go organic, it could move markets. Organic fibers account for only 0.04 percent of clothing sales in the United States, a mere $85 million in 2003, according to the Organic Trade Association (OTA). If this sounds small to you, it is. On the bright side, the OTA estimates that organic fiber sales will grow by 15.5 percent per year over the next three years. At the next Academy Awards, as Melissa and Joan dish with the stars, it would be great if the Ladies Rivers dug a little deeper. They shouldn’t settle for asking whether the dress is Valentino or Armani; they should also find out what the fibers are. JLo in an Yves Saint Laurent gown made of corn polymer—now that would turn heads. ■ June/July 2005 www.plentymag.com
ASSOCIATED PRESS, GRAYLOCK
GIVE THE PEOPLE WHAT THEY WANT—JUST DO IT MARK SPELLUN
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