OnEarth Magazine Articles

Letters from Our Readers: Spring 2008

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 11:37:47 -0600

Corporate Greenwash

Joel Makower's sanguinity about corporate environmentalism ("Selling Points," Winter 2008) is baffling, given what he seems to admit in his anecdote about Levi Strauss: a giant corporation improves a tiny percentage of its product line while its bread-and-butter business remains unchanged. Corporate greening is so often a case of capitalizing on the halo effect -- offering a pittance of green products, or less odious versions of products that were offensive to begin with, thus bathing the whole corporation in a virtuous glow. Better isn't necessarily good if worse was truly terrible.

Alex Jensen
Salt Lake City,Utah

Forgotten Wetlands

I was surprised that in Kim Larsen's discussion of draining wetlands to stem the spread of malaria she did not address the environmental harm that such an approach might cause.

Walter Sheppe
Akron, Ohio

Wal-Mart Is________

Lisa Selin Davis's interview with Joel Makower ("Selling Points," Winter 2008) was a perfect follow-up to a discussion I had with my neighbors here on the south shore of Lake Superior regarding Paul Hawken's recent book, Blessed Unrest. Someone suggested we all have the power to vote with our pocketbooks, which led us to discuss (with a touch of disgust) our local Super Wal-Mart and its environmental actions, which many see as greenwashing. The wiser among us made the point that if Wal-Mart pushed its suppliers to become more sustainable, the impact would be felt nationwide. And then there it was in Davis's interview: Makower's statement that Wal-Mart is now going to grade its 60,000 suppliers on eco-friendliness! My optimism grows. Perhaps we'll invite him to present at our annual Pie & Politics at the Big Top Chautauqua, an evening of political speech and free pie.

Jo Bailey
Bayfield, Wisconsin

Casualties

I read C. Michael Ray's "Cowboys and Indians" piece in the Winter 2008 issue and was puzzled by the caption on the photograph of rancher Marv Kammerer, which states that dozens of military aircraft have crashed on Kammerer's land. I find it difficult to believe that more than 24 planes have crashed on his 2,200 acres (roughly 3.5 square miles). If this is true, Ray has stumbled upon the Mother of Bermuda Triangles.

Andrew Beasley
Monmouth, Oregon

The editors respond: Mr. Beasley may have a point. According to the U.S. Air Force, since 1942 there have been at least 37 plane crashes and 97 fatalities in the vicinity of Ellsworth Air Force Base, which borders Marv Kammerer's property. Kammerer, whose family has owned the land since the 1880s, maintains that there have been dozens of fatalities associated with crashes of Air Force planes on his land, a figure that the Air Force will neither confirm nor deny. The caption on page 39 should have stated the number of fatalities he says have occurred on the property, not the number of plane crashes.

No Smoking, Please

I enjoyed David Gessner's journey down the restored Charles River ("Riding the Wild Charles," Winter 2008), but I was dismayed to see cigar smoking featured in the illustration and mentioned in the text. Wittingly or unwittingly, this suggests that smoking tobacco is something that "rakish iconoclast" naturalists just do, and that its association with the outdoors and environmental preservation somehow makes it okay. Pointing this out sets me up to be accused of the tiresome "earnestness" Gessner has decried in other environmental writings, but tobacco is no friend of environmentalism. Tobacco is a heavily pesticide-, herbicide-, and fungicide-dependent crop, requiring chemicals at virtually every stage from planting to storage. Its cultivation contributes to groundwater pollution, deforestation, and air pollution in developing countries, where, increasingly, it is displacing food crops. Tobacco is a social and environmental justice issue of the first order and should be covered as such in the environmental press.

Ruth E. Malone
San Francisco, California

Wrong Way!

With respect to the photograph of Dan Driscoll on page 38: For crying out loud, learn how to paddle. A single person paddling should have his knees just behind the center thwart. The way that guy is sitting, the first wave will dump him.

Addison Austin
Labelle, Florida

Curing Malaria

Kim Larsen's article ("Bad Blood," Winter 2008) reminds us of the devastation wrought by malaria, especially in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia. The potential value of environmental controls is rightly emphasized. But there is only the barest mention of a weapon that is among the most readily available and is increasingly affordable: artemisinin-based combination therapy, or ACT. Artemisinins are effective drugs, as has been shown by decades of use in Thailand and more recent use in Vietnam and other Asian countries. Despite intensive use, resistance to these drugs has not yet developed. Combining them with another antimalarial is, as Larsen notes, intended to slow further the emergence of resistance.

Expanding the use of the drugs will require government subsidies (by no means large ones, perhaps $400 million a year), and a number of European countries, led by the Netherlands, are now working to get artemisinins distributed through private and public health clinics in African nations.

The total eradication of malaria, if at all possible, will require more than drugs: environmental controls, house spraying, and pesticide-impregnated bed nets are all needed. But we might well cut the death rate in half by widespread use of ACTs.

Kenneth J. Arrow
Stanford, California

Arrow is a Nobel laureate in economics and former chairman of the National Academy's committee on the economics of antimalarials.

Errata: On page 19 of the Winter 2008 issue a reference was made to a "black and yellow agriope spider"; the correct spelling is argiope. The photographs that accompany "Our Trial by Fire" were taken by Michael Gallacher.

The Carbon Exchange

Molly Webster, Mieke Roth — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 11:24:31 -0600

In the carbon cycle, it's not just about the individual tree — the entire forest plays a role. Leaves take in carbon dioxide, converting it to sugar, which is carbon-based. Some of the sugar is used immediately for energy, converted back to CO2, and released into the atmosphere. The rest is stored in living wood or dead matter, such as fallen leaves and branches. Old-growth forests, in particular, store vast amounts of carbon while continuing to absorb CO2.

The illustration below, by Mieke Roth, is available as a full-size print-quality PDF file here.

Why I Still Believe in the Zoo

Susan Freinkel — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:11:25 -0600

One unusually warm day in November, I took my 10-year-old daughter, Moriah, to the San Francisco Zoo. It had been a while since our last visit, and we meandered from exhibit to exhibit until we found ourselves in the section where the polar bears are displayed.

The first bear was alone in her grotto, sitting back on her haunches, staring off into space. Uulu, I read, was born in 1980 in Churchill, Manitoba, one of the breeding grounds for Canada’s southern population of polar bears. I’ve seen videos of the area online. Though frozen, gray, and desolate, it still seemed less barren than the 1940s-era concrete space Uulu occupied. Clearly I wasn’t the first person to have that thought, for another sign noted that Uulu, as well as the two polar bears in the grotto next door, received regular “environmental and behavioral enrichment” -- training, games, and exercises such as following man-made scent trails to “stimulate their minds and . . . give them fun things to do.”

Polar bears in the wild are fearsome creatures, up to 11 feet tall and weighing 1,000 pounds. They can gallop 35 miles an hour and swim 60 miles in a day. But on this unseasonably warm afternoon, all three bears lay still, as if pinned to the concrete by the sun’s rays. A woman next to me made kissing sounds to entice one of the bears to turn his head so her daughter could capture his face on her cell phone camera.

“Let’s go to the next exhibit,” Moriah said, tugging at my hand.

“Why?” I asked.

“This one’s sad,” she said. “These polar bears are out in the hot weather on hot stones with no ice.”

I don’t know if the polar bears really were uncomfortable, but I understood my daughter’s distress. Zoos have always aroused a discomfiting mix of feelings in me: the thrill of seeing wild beings close up; the depressing fact of captivity. Even in the best exhibits, the animals seem diminished by the inevitable bars. As Vicki Croke wrote in her history of zoos, The Modern Ark, “Cut off from its place in the world, an animal appears as only a shadow of its true self.”

What about when an animal is not only cut off from its place in the world but loses that place entirely? The ceaseless press of human beings has whittled wild spaces down to just 17 percent of the planet. With each encroachment, wildlife dwindles, so that more than 5,700 species are now lurching toward the brink of extinction. That includes a quarter of all mammals and one in eight species of birds.

“There aren’t many polar bears left in the wild,” I heard a man tell his son. But the real point is, there’s not much of a wild left for polar bears. If Uulu were set free, where would she go? Global warming is melting the Arctic sea ice so fast that experts fear in 50 years the only polar bears left may be those in captivity. Then a bear like Uulu won’t even be a shadow of her true self; she’ll be a ghost.

I’ve visited many zoos in my lifetime, and inevitably there’s a moment -- when a gorilla looks me square in the eye or I see a deeply social animal like an elephant penned up alone -- when I find myself wondering: What is the point of this place? It’s a question that made headlines as I was writing this piece, when one of the Siberian tigers at the San Francisco Zoo escaped from its pen on Christmas day and killed one teenager and mauled two others before being shot dead by police.

Humans have been collecting and displaying exotic animals for more than 4,000 years. The earliest zoos were designed to display a ruler’s wealth and power. They also served as an entertaining spectacle, and that role continues. Each year zoos draw more visitors -- 157 million -- than all professional sports combined.

As the signs in front of nearly every exhibit my daughter and I passed made clear, they also have a mission: wildlife conservation. Indeed, today’s zoos operate as modern-day Noah’s arks, gathering up threatened species, sustaining their populations through captive breeding, and, when possible, returning them to the wild. Sadly, it felt as though the only animals Moriah and I saw that weren’t facing some kind of threat were the gulls flying in from the nearby ocean to scavenge for food.

Although zoos have historically focused on collecting charismatic crowd-pleasers like tigers and bears, the situation is now so dire that even the lowliest of creatures, such as frogs and newts, need a lifeline too. Amphibians are currently besieged by a wave of extinction rivaling the one that swept away the dinosaurs. About half of the 6,000 known species of frogs, salamanders, and newts are imperiled by a combination of threats: a lethal fungal infection, global warming, and loss of habitat to urbanization and deforestation.

Kevin Zippel coordinates teams of scientists who carry out rescue missions on behalf of Amphibian Ark, a group that works with zoos to find safe havens for threatened frogs and other amphibians. “It’s overwhelming to see a place that’s so beautiful and untouched but know that it’s going to be decimated, and that the only future these things have is in captivity,” he says. So far, zoos have been able to accommodate only about 10 percent of the 500 most endangered amphibian species.

Envisioning the countless generations of frogs that will be marooned in tidy glass terrariums, I can’t help but think about Martha, the last passenger pigeon, who died in 1914 after spending most of her life in the Cincinnati Zoo in a condition of scarcely imaginable aloneness. Zoos often describe their animals as ambassadors of the wild, yet if their wild race is gone, their wild space vanished, what ambassadorial role is left for them to play? Does it make sense to save one piece of the wild if its only future is within the tame confines of a cage?

Tatiana, the marauding Siberian tiger, was a product of the Species Survival Program (SSP), a collaborative effort among zoos and aquariums to oversee the care and breeding of certain endangered species. Tatiana was born in the Denver Zoo to parents selected by the SSP Siberian tiger coordinator, who also recommended sending her to San Francisco in 2005 to be a companion to the zoo’s other Siberian tiger, Tony. This sort of effort has helped preserve the genetic diversity of the species, while anti-poaching and conservation measures in Russia and China have helped raise the wild population of these tigers from about 50 at the time of World War II to about 400 today. Nevertheless, poaching and deforestation still go on. More Siberian tigers -- about 600 -- live in captivity than in the wild.

It’s not clear what led Tatiana to cross the 33-foot moat and scale the 12.5-foot wall surrounding her enclosure, but there’s no mystery about her behavior once she got out. She acted like a tiger. And when she did, I think, she pierced the vital fiction that makes zoos possible. For all the appearances of a peaceable kingdom of docile shadows, the animals remember who they are: flesh-and-blood marvels of a tooth-and-claw world.

“I’m not going back there any time soon,” my daughter said after hearing about the tiger attack.

“Are you afraid it could happen again?” I asked, as I tried to think about how I would reassure her.

“No,” she said, struggling to explain. “It would just feel weird.”

It does feel weird. Once we get a glimpse of the animals’ true selves, putting them in zoos seems a sorry sort of salvation.
Noble as the zoo-as-ark idea may be, it’s no long-term answer for the world’s wildlife. Noah knew the floodwaters would recede one day, but for many animals, like the polar bear, the waters could well keep rising unless human behavior changes. Animals are safe in zoos, but they’re not saved in zoos, one zookeeper told me. The real salvation for wildlife lies in saving wild spaces. To accomplish that, more and more zoos are turning themselves into storefronts for field-based conservation efforts, as zoo managers shift their focus from the world inside the fence to the broader one beyond it.

I can see that new emphasis when I take a stroll through the San Francisco Zoo’s new Lemur Island exhibit, a grand space full of mature cypress pines, eucalyptus trees, and platforms where five species of this endangered animal can sport and hide. Signs inform me that the lemurs have been rescued from the dwindling forests of Madagascar and that the zoo is working with locals there to find economic alternatives to the hunting, logging, and slash-and-burn agriculture that destroy lemur habitat. Other zoos are doing similar things. The Saint Louis Zoo, for example, is working with Masai tribespeople in Kenya to carve out a corridor of safe grazing lands for a tiny population of Grevey’s zebra, and the Gladys Porter Zoo, in Brownsville, Texas, is protecting sea turtle nesting sites in Mexico.

Despite my qualms, I still believe in zoos. Even the best Discovery Channel documentary can’t match the experience of seeing wild animals in real life: the immediacy awakens our innate sense of connection to other creatures. I think of the time I got to feed a giraffe and felt its velvety, muscular tongue pluck eucalyptus leaves from my fingers, or the time my daughter and I watched a Sumatran tiger snooze just on the other side of the glass and saw his whiskers quiver and twitch the way our cat’s whiskers do. Those experiences are where the spark of conservation begins.

But it doesn’t require seeing a tiger or a giraffe, as I was reminded when wandering through the zoo on another day recently. I came across a woman and her 2 -year-old granddaughter. They had stopped in the middle of a path and the girl was transfixed, not by any of the exotic animals around her but by a black and yellow caterpillar crawling along the ground. The woman, Charlotte Duren, told me she takes Mary to the zoo every week. “She loves animals,” Duren said.

Young as she was, Mary was respectful, careful not to touch the caterpillar or block its way. She toddled behind it as it crawled over the asphalt, across the mulched flowerbeds, and then disappeared into the bushes beyond. The girl watched it go. “Bye-bye caterpillar,” she called after it.

Looking Back

Roberta Swann — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 12:36:41 -0600

You can take a city girl to the country,
and get her to get on with worms,
a plague of caterpillars even,
this year's ladybugs--who doesn't like a ladybug?
But heaps, everywhere?

Back on the deck, breaking in another bikini,
she sunbathes, watching hummingbirds chase one another
from the feeder, until a chickadee runs them both
out of town--tourists anyway.

He's off
planting heirlooms, while crows hang in pines,
waiting for action. Everything is la di da, until
a neighbor starts shooting off guns and firecrackers.
And flies arrive. Slap. Spray. Pray. Plead. Read labels.
Realize repel and discourage are code for: Good Luck!

The only way out is in. So she slips into something
less comfortable and takes a walk. That neighbor
roaring by on his ATV calls out: " Happy Memorial Day!"
She recovers on a rock. Listens to wind. La di da.
Until flies arrive. She sprays. One dances on the nozzle,
slim legs tap-tapping high heels on marble.
Such footwork! Who could hate such a fly?
She looks closer. Takes off rose-tinted Gucci glasses
and sees its hundred eyes looking back.

Illustration by Blair Thornley

Spring 2008: Ocean Treasure, Water World, Carbon Quandary

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:27:28 -0600

NRDC experts tackle many of the same issues covered in OnEarth by independent journalists. Here's a quick peek behind the headlines.

Ocean Treasure

Plans to mine deep-sea hydrothermal vents, as described by Kevin Krajick in "Mine, All Mine" (page 13), have the potential to despoil an undiscovered part of the ocean biome. It wouldn't be the first time. Other oceanic communities, such as those on seamounts, are being lost to trawl fishing. To stop the plunder, NRDC helped secure a September 2007 international agreement that restricts trawling in the South Pacific.

Water World

Protecting the limited bounty of the Colorado and other rivers is one of the ways we can prepare for climate change. NRDC advocates new methods of water conservation, all of which are detailed in a recently released report, In Hot Water. Pat Mulroy, the no-nonsense head of the Southern Nevada Water Authority who appears in Tim Folger’s “Requiem for a River” (page 24), penned the introduction. Read the report at www.nrdc.org/publications/default.asp.

Carbon Quandary

In this issue's lead review ("Calling All Mad Scientists," page 52), Josie Glausiusz considers plans to dispose of CO₂. NRDC is investigating geologic carbon sequestration--hiding carbon beneath our feet, in rocks--and is pushing the appropriate federal agencies to establish safety guidelines for such practices.

Even the Dead Are at Risk

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 14:17:19 -0600

One of the peculiarities of living in Venice is that people must bury their dead aboveground -- or rather above water. And the challenges to the survival of the city will only grow worse as sea levels rise over the next century. Venice, la Serenissima, is one of 14 sites being photographed by the Canary Project (www.canary-project.org) to portray landscapes threatened by climate change. Photographer Susannah Sayler documents not only disasters (retreating glaciers in the Alps, drought in China) but also solutions (flood barriers in the Netherlands, wind farms in Palm Springs, California). Her work aims to "integrate the tools of art with those of science, education, mass communication, and other disciplines."

The Trucker's Lament

Alyssa Robb — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:53:28 -0600

Lorenzo Fernandez has been a truck driver at the Port of Oakland, California, for just two years, but he already has a chronic cough and an unrelenting sore throat. Drivers who have been on the job longer suffer from even more serious conditions. He worries that he won’t be able to support his family if his health worsens.

Every day he and other port workers inhale a toxic mix of air pollutants that come from diesel-burning trucks--including the one he drives--as well as ships, cranes, and other dockside machinery. Inside the cabs of trucks like Fernandez’s, the concentration of diesel particulates is often up to 2,000 times greater than levels considered acceptable by state and federal environmental protection agencies. That dismal finding is among the many detailed in a report, Driving on Fumes: Truck Drivers Face Elevated Health Risks from Diesel Pollution, recently released by NRDC and the Coalition for Clean and Safe Ports. Drivers don't even receive health care benefits from the companies they work for--technically, they’re independent contractors--and they're also responsible for buying and maintaining their own trucks. It’s nearly impossible for truckers to buy both health insurance and a lower emissions vehicle. Several days after the NRDC report was released, the California Air Resources Board, which sets regulations for trucks at the state’s ports, adopted a new rule slashing diesel pollution from trucks. Now NRDC is working to shift the burden of upgrading the truck fleet from the drivers and taxpayers to the trucking companies and ports themselves.

NRDC in the News: Spring 2008

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 09:47:59 -0600

“ ‘And so it makes sense, particularly in an area as rich biologically as the waters of the Southern California coast, to expect that the Navy would test and train in an environmentally responsible way,’ [said Joel Reynolds, a senior attorney and director of NRDC’s Marine Mammal Protection Project].”
—From “Navy Not Exempt From Sonar Ban,” National Public Radio, February 5, 2008

“ ‘The daily trip to the cash register is a place where people are making an environmental decision,’ said Jon Coifman, a spokesman for [NRDC]. ‘People are feeling like this is a chance for them to vote.’”
—From “Whole Foods Banning Plastic Bags at all Stores,” Austin American-Statesman, January 23, 2008

“Several experts applauded the new goals [of promoting energy efficiency on and off store shelves]. ‘When Wal-Mart asks, suppliers jump,’ said Noah Horowitz, senior scientist at [NRDC]. ‘There are positive ripple effects throughout the supply chain.’”
—From “Wal-Mart Sets Agenda of Change,” New York Times, January 24, 2008

“ ‘The president's [energy] priorities appear to be feeding money into large, academic, futuristic programs instead of efficiency that could benefit people today,’ [said Ned Farquhar, a senior attorney at NRDC].”
—From “Reid: Renewables Shorted by Bush Budget,” Las Vegas Sun, February 6, 2008

Eating Our Words

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 10:18:40 -0600

Ever since Dr. Samuel Johnson published his famous dictionary in 1755, one of the biggest problems facing the lexicographer has been to decide which newly coined words will last and which are just a short-term fad. Following this tradition, the annual update to the New Oxford American Dictionary names its favorite neologism of the year. In 2006 it was carbon-neutral; in 2007 the word was locavore -- someone who favors fresh, locally produced food. Unlike Dr. Johnson’s dandiprat, looby, and jobbernowl (look them up), this one might even stick around for a while.

Wild Birds of the American Wetlands

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 18:16:14 -0600

To the photographer Rosalie Winard, white pelicans look like synchronized swimmers: "Think Esther Williams with feathers." In perfect unison, they move in circles on the surface of the water, herding the fish beneath them. Storks, by contrast, are wily, shading the water with outstretched wing, luring prey into their shadows. These birds have been Winard's obsession since she was 17; she photographs them as one might a family member caught in an intimate moment -- preening, greeting mates, caring for their young. An essay by Terry Tempest Williams accompanies Winard's collection of 100 black-and-white images, including this Sandhill crane in Florida.

Eye on Washington: Spring 2008

Julia Bovey — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 15:45:14 -0600

New cars will soon go farther on a gallon of gas, thanks, at long last, to the energy bill Congress passed late last year raising fuel mileage standards for the first time in more than three decades. Better mileage is something to celebrate--who doesn't want to pay less at the pump?--but the resulting reduction in greenhouse gas emissions could be undercut by energy industry plans to increase the production of oil from dirty, unconventional fuel sources, namely tar sands, oil shale, and liquid coal. Fortunately the energy bill also contains a little-publicized section (526) that prohibits the federal government from buying any fuel that creates more global warming pollution over the course of its full life cycle than conventional oil would have generated. Tar sands, oil shale, and liquid coal all fall under that umbrella. NRDC is now working in communities across the country to make sure that the law is enforced. For example, in Great Falls, Montana, NRDC is helping residents fight the construction of a liquid coal plant on a nearby Air Force base, where the defense department plans to make jet fuel. Under section 526, that’s not legal. NRDC is also fighting government handouts for dirty fuels in all sorts of other bills--even in the Farm Bill.

Godiva's Latest Ride

Wendee Holtcamp — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 12:18:21 -0600

We know chocolate fires libidos, improves moods, and makes hearts healthy. Who knew it could fuel cars? In December 2007, British adventurers Andy Pag and John Grimshaw drove from Spain to Timbuktu, Mali, running on biofuel made from factory-discarded chocolate (the trip consumed the equivalent of 80,000 bars) and recycled cooking oil. The two Brits drove a Ford Cargo truck 4,500 miles across the Sahara, avoiding an Al Qaeda shootout and a sandstorm along the way. The highlight of their visit to Timbuktu, Pag says, was finding out about research being done locally on jatropha, a hardy pest- and drought-resistant plant that was recently singled out by Goldman Sachs as one of the world’s most promising sources of biofuel.

The Climate of Man

Laura Wright — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 11:31:52 -0600

Modern medicine, technology, and our urbanized lifestyle often allow us to forget how intertwined our health is with the natural environment. But global warming-through its impact on the plants all around us-has begun to change that.

As carbon dioxide levels rise, plants are among the first to respond, because they use carbon dioxide to photosynthesize their own food. But as temperature and CO2 levels climb together, affecting both the growth rate and range of many plants, researchers are asking what will happen to us as the plants that provide food and medicine-or make us sick, such as ragweed-respond to climate change.

"This may be the first piece of the global warming puzzle that tells us, yes, we see that increasing greenhouse gas emissions have effects that are both local and predictable," says Kim Knowlton, a science fellow with NRDC's health program and the lead author of a recent NRDC report, Sneezing and Wheezing: How Global Warming Could Increase Ragweed Allergies, Air Pollution, and Asthma.

Heavy ozone smog caused by urban pollution and ragweed pollen are each known to aggravate asthma, but Knowlton and her NRDC colleagues were concerned by studies showing that the combined effects of the two could be even worse. NRDC mapped for the first time the regions where ragweed and unhealthy ozone levels overlap. About 110 million people across the United States are subject to double exposure, with areas of higher risk in Los Angeles, New York City, the southern Mississippi River Valley, the Great Lakes region, the mid-Atlantic states, and New England. According to the Asthma and Allergy Foundation of America, those regions are already home to 13 of the nation's 15 worst cities for asthma sufferers.

NRDC's report drew on the work of Lewis Ziska, who conducts research in aerobiology-the science of airborne biological particles such as pollen and other allergens-at the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Ziska realized that urban environments could be used as surrogates for a warmer world, because cities are warmer than nearby rural areas by anything from 3.5 degrees to 8.0 degrees Fahrenheit. That's close to the global temperature increase projected by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In Ziska's studies of ragweed growth and pollen production in Baltimore and rural Maryland, plants in the city, where temperatures and carbon dioxide concentrations are higher, grow larger and produce more pollen than their rural counterparts.

Ragweed is an opportunistic plant, moving into cracks and crevices in sidewalks, vacant lots, construction sites, or any other disturbed environment it finds. Cities and suburban sprawl offer those features in abundance.

In high-traffic areas, including cities, ports, and bus depots, the disturbed environment provides the perfect setting for diesel pollution to combine with pollen, potentially causing spikes in asthma rates during the late-summer ragweed season. "Pollen can attach to diesel fumes, which then allows it to be drawn more deeply into the lungs," Ziska says.

As Knowlton and Ziska see it, these studies bring global warming home. But Knowlton believes they have the potential to do much more. California's efforts to obtain a waiver that would allow state officials to enforce stricter controls on global warming pollution from automobiles have been denied by the Environmental Protection Agency, partly on the grounds that, as of yet, climate change has had no local effects.

But, Knowlton says, "maybe these are the first local effects."

Risky Business in the West

Ben Carmichael — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:13:55 -0600

Dee Hoffmeister, a 10-year resident of Silt, Colorado, returned home one day in 2005 to find a cloud of gas hovering near her house, which sits just 800 feet from an oil well. She passed out a few minutes later. Since then, Hoffmeister has suffered nausea, skin inflammation, and chronic fatigue. Her story is becoming more common in western towns where the oil and gas industry is booming. Wells are drilled next to schools, including one elementary school in Aztec, New Mexico, where drilling goes on 150 feet from the playground. Congress has granted exemptions from laws that would protect the environment from contaminants such as arsenic, mercury, acetone, and radium. To expose the loopholes that allow the industry to put human health at risk, NRDC published a report in October 2007 in cooperation with Rocky Mountain Clean Air Action. To read the report, including Hoffmeister’s story and those of others like her, go to www.nrdc.org/land/use/down/contents.asp.

Ozone Alert

Elton Glaser — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 12:51:45 -0600

The last of June burns to the third degree,
Sun swelling like a blister on the sky.

For once, I'd rather be breathing out
Little clots of cold from a thin winter.

Robins fan themselves with their hot wings
And worms slink deeper for some dark relief.

From the bossy radio, warnings not to gas a tank
Or blaze a barbecue with forbidden fuel.

Good citizen that I am, I won't mow the lawn
Or let asthmatic joggers run their noonday routes.

I won’t open a hydrant in the street, even though
Every pore on me opens like a spout.

Wherever the wind's gone, I want to go, too.
Leaves hang like the tongues of tired dogs.

Others may shade themselves in the cool of movies
Or float over the chlorine ripples of a pool.

Should I shut the windows tight and turn
The thermostat as low as the level of polar floes?

Night can't come soon enough for me, or storms
That drain the heat and douse the summer air.

Illustration by Blair Thornley

The Spirit and Passion of a Warrior

Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:37:12 -0600

On December 6, 2007, NRDC honored Frederick A. O. Schwarz Jr., who stepped down as chairman of the board after 17 years of leadership. He will continue to serve as a trustee. At the celebration, Fritz, as he is known to friends, shared some words of inspiration. The following is an excerpt from his speech.

"NRDC is the earth's best defense: for the air we breathe, the water we drink, the wild places we preserve, the wild creatures we protect, and the children whose health we strive to safeguard. But the question remains: Will our generation be the first in human history to knowingly leave the world a worse place for our children? If this happens, it will be a disgrace and an embarrassment.

"Global warming is the greatest threat we face, but it is not the only threat. Even without global warming, too many wild places are disappearing, too many species are being snuffed out, and too many babies are being born with bodies and brains damaged by man-made chemicals and pollution.

"How, then, can our cause prevail? To win, we must capture human passion. In our quest, we have much on our side. Spiritual values are on our side. The children are on our side. But unless we solve global warming, those children will one day ask their parents: Did you really live when there were wild polar bears? We will not despair, for we will couple our passion with steadfast, determined, and intelligent action. NRDC brings together passion and action. We are not summertime soldiers. We fight this battle every day, all year long. We must not let the eyes of our children gaze out upon a vast wasteland. We cannot leave this earth ruined for generations to come. We must change how people think--and how they act. This is our world. Let's take it back."

The Story of Stuff.com

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 14:21:01 -0600

So what's wrong with my iPod? Ask Annie Leonard, who delves into the life cycles of consumer goods -- everything from, yes, iPods to pillows -- in her animated video, The Story of Stuff (www.storyofstuff.com). Eco-activist Leonard stands in front of a plain white background with cartoon icons dancing above her head, detailing the path of must-have items from their origin as natural resources, through their mass production, and, finally, to their all-too-rapid disposal in landfills. Leonard's lesson: our "linear material economy" is eroding both the environment and our communities and simply can't be sustained.

Meanwhile, Leonard points out, we've become full-time consumers who work longer hours than people did in feudal society. And people who don't feed into the consumption cycle--omigod, those shoes are so 2006--are stigmatized as being beyond uncool. "All this extra stuff is costing us--and it's not even fun," Leonard says. She hopes the video, which has had more than 1.5 million hits since its Web debut in December 2007, will encourage people to free themselves from this cycle of manic consumption. Leonard says, "It's about liberation, not sacrifice."

How to Plant Trees

Molly Webster — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0600

Buying carbon offsets and planting trees are becoming all the rage. But the devil is in the details. Some forestry projects can add carbon dioxide to the air and damage local habitats. And there is no independent environmental certification program for forestry offset programs. But there are ways to identify worthwhile projects.

If you invest in planting new trees, realize that it takes about 20 years for newly forested clear-cuts to start sequestering more carbon than they release. Choose projects that won't cut down the trees as soon as they mature or, even better, that allow trees to see their centennial. Also, avoid monoculture plantations-large swaths of land covered with identical species. These often increase pollution because they use pesticides and fertilizers. Another option: put your money toward saving forests that would otherwise be cut down. Check out World Land Trust, at www.carbonbalanced.org, which is working to conserve forests in Latin America.

Lastly, look to forestry projects that help sustain local economies, biodiversity, and watersheds. Two organizations to consider, both with projects in Africa, are Plan Vivo, www.planvivo.org, and The Green World Campaign, www.greenworld.org.

Calling All Mad Scientists

Josie Glausiusz — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 17:53:31 -0600

In the summer of 1858, a putrid odor of raw sewage arose from the River Thames in London and choked the city in its sickly grip. The Great Stink, as it came to be known, spurred Britain's lawmakers to rush a bill through Parliament to provide the money to build a modern sewer system -- one that would discharge sewage downstream from the river's drinking water intake. Construction of similar structures in the same era in a number of European and American cities, including Paris and Chicago, ended epidemics of typhoid and cholera, which victims contracted by drinking water contaminated with feces. If the Victorians could eliminate these diseases through careful disposal of human waste, why can't we counter climate change by extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and burying it where it can do us no harm?

That radical proposal lies at the core of Fixing Climate, the latest in a spate of books on the seemingly intractable problem of global warming. While most writers stress the need to cut greenhouse gas emissions, the authors of Fixing Climate -- Columbia University earth scientist Wallace Broecker and the science writer Robert Kunzig -- suggest instead that we view carbon dioxide as a form of sewage: a pollutant with which we have carelessly contaminated the atmosphere, but one that we can remove with the right technology. Doing so is necessary, they argue, because the chance that we will succeed in paring back our carbon emissions with the speed required to avert disaster is quite small.

Broecker and Kunzig embrace a techno-fix that would require us to scrub our carbon dioxide waste from the atmosphere and sock it away in rocks. Their proposal is typically American: upbeat in its can-do spirit, yet pragmatic. The pair are not breast-beating penitents. In fact, they open their book with an eloquent ode to the beauty of the piston engine, acknowledging that fossil fuels have enabled the average American to live as well as a preindustrial king. Yet it's time to shovel away the scum. "We need to create the means for taking our carbon back out of the air and putting it underground, where it came from," they write.

If anyone should be taken seriously on the topic of climate change, it is Wallace Broecker, who has spent more than 50 years studying the climate of the past 200,000 years, and who was one of the first to warn, more than three decades ago, of the dangers of global warming. Born in 1931 ("the same year as Twinkies," the book points out), he arrived in 1952 at what is now Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, New York. He has spent his entire career there, publishing more than 400 papers and winning numerous prizes, including the National Medal of Science. Over the years, Broecker has developed ways to calculate the rate of gas exchange between the atmosphere and the ocean -- in particular, oceanic uptake of carbon dioxide -- and devised what is known as Broecker's Conveyor Belt, a global scheme of ocean circulation that is thought to drive climate patterns the world over.

As background to their proposal, Broecker and Kunzig devote about a third of their book to explaining the complex history of climate change science; a laudable effort, though at times my eyelids did begin to droop. To their credit, they enliven the text with asides on the notable figures who first figured out the science at hand (among them the Swedish physicist Svante Arrhenius, whose "ravishing young wife, Sophia" deserted him in 1894 after a year of marriage in the midst of his calculations on planet-
warming carbon dioxide).

The book's real focus, though, is a climate fix hatched by Klaus Lackner, now a physicist at the Earth Institute at Columbia University. Lackner's company, Global Research Technologies, announced in the spring of 2007 that it had built a prototype "air-capture technology product" to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere. When Broecker first heard Lackner talking about his ideas in 1999, he recalled thinking, "This guy is nuts." Lackner, then an associate director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, argued that we should attempt to accelerate the natural chemical breakdown of rocks. The plan: grind up billions of tons of magnesium- or calcium-rich rocks, chemically combine them with carbon dioxide to form another type of rock -- a harmless carbonate -- and then find a place to put the resulting mountains of the stuff. Later on, Broecker found Lackner's tendency to think big-and his willingness to attack a problem from first principles -- "more exciting than crazy," and lured him to Columbia.

In fact, there is nothing all that revolutionary about pulling carbon dioxide out of the air; it is done on every space shuttle and submarine to prevent crews from asphyxiating on their own exhaled breath. Lackner built his prototype on a budget of $5 million from the late Gary Comer, the founder of Lands' End. In this device, crushed rocks have been replaced by a plastic compound that reacts with CO2 to form sodium bicarbonate: essentially, baking soda. If Lackner's vision comes to fruition, 20-foot-tall carbon-sucking towers-each resembling an erect Tower of Pisa-could be arrayed all over the planet. The final step in this massive cleanup project would be to extract CO2 from the bicarbonate and inject it into the ground in liquid form.

Each tower would extract about one ton of carbon dioxide a day, so it would take an awful lot of towers to scrub the 80 million tons we emit daily. The sheer scale of the problem dwarfs any single solution, but in Broecker and Kunzig's view, Lackner's invention is "the only hope." Their reasoning is simple: the towers can be placed anywhere -- far easier and more practical than attaching a CO2 scrubber to every car and airplane on the planet. And because CO2 disperses quickly through the entire atmosphere, removing it in one spot helps the whole world.

By contrast, say Broecker and Kunzig, collecting CO2 from the flues of power plants would entail transporting the gas perhaps hundreds of miles to a dumping ground. Nevertheless, this too promises to be an important means for steering us from the path of doom, should we manage to make it happen. In January, the Department of Energy scrapped plans for FutureGen, a coal-fired plant that was to collect and dispose of its own CO2 emissions.

The Norwegian oil company Statoil currently captures CO2 from its drilling operations at the Sleipner natural gas field in the North Sea, and it then injects a million tons of the gas each year under the seabed. There are plenty of other places to put the heat-trapping gas. Iceland, for example, is made entirely of basalt, a volcanic rock rich in calcium silicates, which bind with CO2. This fall, Reykjavik Energy plans to begin pumping carbon dioxide half a mile deep into basalt deposits. Vast banks of basalt also exist elsewhere: in the United States, volcanic rock covers more than 60,000 square miles of Washington, Idaho, and Oregon.

Detractors will inevitably dub such schemes misguided or deluded. Tim Flannery, for one, argues in his 2005 book, The Weather Makers, that the volume of carbon dioxide we create is "so prodigious that it seems impossible for Earth to tuck it away without suffering fatal indigestion." The authors of Fixing Climate are not oblivious to the scale of the problem or the expense of the solution. If we choose Lackner's original proposal, then large mounds of carbonate must be piled or buried somewhere. That would transform the landscape, but so would covering hundreds of square miles with solar panels. "There is no free lunch in solving the CO2 problem," Broecker and Kunzig say.

As for Lackner's current proposal to array carbon-capturing towers across the globe, they admit that it sounds utopian. "If the amount [of CO2] the world produced in a single year were spread over Manhattan, it would rise three-quarters of the way up the Empire State Building. On the other hand, if all the wastewater produced in the United States alone were spread over Manhattan, even the radio antenna on top of the Empire State would be far beneath the waves. Yet somehow in the twentieth century we managed to get our sewage problem under control." With our own Great Stink now threatening to overpower the entire planet, we owe it to ourselves and our descendants to consider the merits of such ambitious technological fixes before we suffocate in our own stifling waste.

Time To Be Unfaithful to Old Faithful

George Black — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 10:00:52 -0600

Okay, here's the plan. Sell Yellowstone to ExxonMobil. Or if that's too much to stomach, maybe hand it off to one of the more enlightened energy giants -- BP, say, or Shell, although getting a foreign ownership deal through Congress might be tricky.

Think of all that geothermal energy going to waste, all of it clean, all endlessly renewable. Set up corporate headquarters at the Old Faithful Inn, lay pipes along the Firehole, drill secondary extraction points in each of the main geyser basins. Surely the surrender of a national park, even if it was our first, is a small price to pay for making a dent in our reliance on fossil fuels and the Saudi royal family.

Well, the votes are in, and apparently this modest proposal has been given the thumbs-down in our readers' poll. Yellowstone is too much to surrender. But then, what are we prepared to give up? Because the reality is that we have to accept some major trade-offs here, and quickly. The situation is too grim, too urgent, to duck them. Idealism may be what gets us up in the morning, yet these days it may not be enough to help us sleep at night.

Take windmills, over which the agonizing has been particularly public. We know that even as they generate all those nice, clean megawatts, they also have an alarming tendency to kill birds and bats. But how many is too many? A hundred a day? A thousand? Four hundred and seventy-three? What if they're common rather than endangered species? Is every sparrow sacred? And then there's the aesthetic question. Personally, I find that wind farms have a kind of chilly, science fiction beauty, especially when seen on a sunlit ridge from two or three miles off. But I'm not sure I'd want one thrumming away in my backyard, especially if I used to look out on an uninterrupted sweep of Adirondack forest or Cape Cod seascape.

Yet in the larger scheme of things, wind farms are small potatoes. What about the really big questions? If corporate greed is already out of control (and former senator John Edwards isn't the only one who worries about that) how do we feel about placing our environmental future in the hands of giant corporations? The argument -- and it has real merit -- is that technological innovation will be our Hail Mary pass, and the lure of further huge profits is what will make it happen. And if global warming truly transcends all other issues, shouldn't environmentalists channel all their material resources, all their political and moral purpose, in that one single direction? If so, does that mean that everything else -- snow leopards, hummingbirds, mountain trails, clean air -- is a dissipation of energy? The kinds of things, in other words, that give the heart its moral impetus in the first place.

These are what politicians like to call tough choices, and an endless stream of them lies ahead. Invest in clean coal or stop burning coal altogether? Green the big-box stores or buy less junk? Follow your dreams or accept the stern restraints of realism?

Fox News, the Competitive Enterprise Institute, and their cohort love it when environmentalists wrestle with these conundrums. Our tough choices become their gleeful registers of hypocrisy: wealthy greens fighting to stop the Cape Wind farm, climate experts flying to Bali for an international conference on global warming. Think of all those airborne carbon emissions!

The irony is that many environmentalists make similar lists, even though their purpose is to sniff out lapses in purity rather than displays of hypocrisy. Some people think we should give up air travel altogether, although how we're supposed to function without it, let alone sit down in one place to hash out the details of life after Kyoto, is never fully explained.

Maybe it helps to remember that life has always been a matter of trade-offs. Again, think of Yellowstone. There it is still, in all its freakish magnificence, and we've agreed (more or less) that there's a price to pay for that: three million visitors a year, phalanxes of RVs, highway spaghetti at Old Faithful. But you can look out over the Lamar Valley, straining for a glimpse of a wolf pack in the oblique rays of the dawn sunlight, and still feel those driving moments of transcendence. Learn to conserve that fierceness of the heart, while cultivating an ever-greater hardness of the head, and we may eventually get somewhere.

Fish Out of Salt Water

Jennifer Weeks — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 10:24:05 -0600

Amid growing alarm on the part of environmentalists, wild-catch fishermen, and ocean scientists over vanishing fish stocks and pollution from offshore fish farms, here's a new idea: raising ocean fish, shellfish, and crustaceans in freshwater.

Several companies are showing that this can be not only environmentally smart but also a profitable addition to the $70 billion aquaculture industry. Pioneers include OceanBoy Farms, which raises Pacific white shrimp in central Florida; Australis Aquaculture, an Australian company that farms barramundi in western Massachusetts; and Virginia Cobia Farms, which produces tank-raised cobia.

Researchers at Florida's Harbor Branch Oceanographic Institute are working on ways to raise other high-value species such as pompano and black sea bass in closed freshwater or low-salinity systems. It isn't easy: many fish can tolerate only very specific salinity ranges, but anadromous fish such as barramundi spend part of their life cycles in fresh or brackish water, and some other species can be acclimated to changing salinities. If scientists succeed, we may come a small step closer to having our fish and eating it too.

From Our Contributors: Spring 2008

Bruce Barcott — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 18:21:19 -0600

Some days Sharon runs around the zoo dressed like a crazy person. She'll pair a green button-down shirt with snakeskin-patterned Lycra pants, the kind worn by heavy-metal guitarists in the eighties. Other times she'll come to work in camouflage pants and a purple tank top. Sometimes I think Sharon dresses this way to heighten her colorful profile. Other times I think she's truly blind to color and pattern in human attire....Sharon doesn't know what she was wearing when she first heard about the dam, but she knows it was a Monday, the zoo's slowest day. She was sipping coffee in her jungle bungalow, flipping through the newspaper. A back-page story caught her eye. cabinet re-thinks hydro site, it said. Belizean Prime Minister Said Musa had decided to construct a hydroelectric dam at a Macal River site called Chalillo.

BRUCE BARCOTT's The Last Flight of the Scarlet Macaw was published in February by Random House.

Major Airlines Check Out

Ben Carmichael — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 15:50:35 -0600

For some, blue skies crisscrossed with airplane contrails elicit worries about global warming more than wistful dreams of faraway lands. Now there may be further cause for concern: major U.S. air carriers, including United and American Airlines, are using jet fuel derived from Canada's tar sands region, the extraction of which is both environmentally ruinous and highly energy intensive (see "Canada's Highway to Hell," Fall 2007). Similarly, JetBlue is promoting a type of fuel made from coal. Producing these fuels emits up to five times more greenhouse gas pollution than producing conventional oil, and global warming emissions from airplanes are already expected to climb 60 percent by 2025. Through its Cool Fuels pledge, NRDC is asking airlines to invest in cleaner, renewable sources, such as biofuels, and to make improvements in efficiency that will save fuel and money.

Looking for a Few Good Men

Wendee Holtcamp — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 12:25:46 -0600

The woman known as Fort Worth's Green Hornet and her sidekick sit in plush chairs inside a single-story brick building on Race Street, filling their spacious one-room office with talk and laughter. The ceiling is made of recycled tiles, the walls are covered in textured, earth-tone clay plaster rather than toxic paint, and on the front desk there's a carved wooden sign that reads "Green Is Sexy." During two years of weekly wine-er, brainstorming-sessions, these two well-dressed, 50-something businesswomen have plotted how to green up this conservative Texas town. Now they've set their sights on something bigger: a scheme to change the lives of U.S. veterans.

The Green Hornet, aka commercial real estate developer Jyl DeHaven, doesn't call herself an environmentalist. Yet she persuaded the city to designate a 10-square-block district encompassing her office as a mixed-use green "urban village." She also serves on the mayor's sustainable building committee. "Two to three years ago, I'm not sure the phrase ‘sustainable building' was in anyone's vocabulary," she says. "This is a very conservative town. We don't like trends."

In 2006, while advising the Tarrant County chapter of Habitat for Humanity on building energy-efficient homes, she met an administrator in the Department of Veterans Affairs who mentioned the high unemployment rates plaguing veterans, particularly young ones. "I couldn't understand how people put their lives on the line, and then they would come back and couldn't find a job," DeHaven says. When 23-year-old Iraq war veteran Paul Hess showed up on her doorstep a few months later looking for work, a seed was planted. Green Collar Vets was born.

DeHaven and Georgia Richey, an insurance agent and "green friend," founded the nonprofit organization in early 2007. The goal: to create a green-collar workforce for burgeoning industries, which often have a shortage of quality laborers, by training unemployed veterans. "They have strong skill sets," DeHaven says. "Why not pull them into an industry that's growing by leaps and bounds?" The jobs that DeHaven has in mind might be anything from solar panel installation to organic agriculture to weatherizing houses.

Green is sexy. Sergeant Hess is smoking hot. But it was his work ethic that impressed DeHaven. "He's a quick study," she says. "He takes pride in his work. He's respectful. All the characteristics that, as an employer, you'd look for." DeHaven and Richey are not shy about parading him in his military dress blues to raise awareness of their endeavors.

With funding from private donations and grants, Green Collar Vets plans to open chapters around the country. "When a local chapter adopts a veteran, we're going to try to spend an average of $2,500, with a maximum of $5,000, per veteran," says Richey. "Our mission is to make it easy for vets to find jobs and training," even beyond what the GI Bill may cover.

Veterans will have to apply competitively to be sponsored by a local chapter, and a new Web site (www.greencollarvets.org) will serve as a nationwide clearinghouse of information. DeHaven hopes that 5 percent of all vets involved will eventually start their own green businesses. The nonprofit may get a boost from the Energy Independence and Security Act, signed into law in December 2007, which, among other things, authorizes $125 million annually for green-collar jobs training.

"Does going green cost more initially?" DeHaven asks. "Maybe, but let's look at the long-term vision. We're a country that's into instant gratification, but I think we're starting to appreciate that we have to look at longer returns than an hour and a half from now."

Transylvania: Welcome to the Future

Bruce Stutz — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:16:17 -0600

The steeply rolling hills of the Transylvanian plateau lie within the gnarled grasp of the Carpathian Mountains, which curve down through Central Europe into the heart of Romania. Although the Carpathians' highest peaks rise only some 8,000 feet, rugged, irregular ridges, difficult to traverse, have always isolated the plateau from the capital city of Bucharest and the sprawling Danube-Black Sea delta to the south. Transylvania did not become a part of Romania until 1918. Even today, only a few roads cross the mountains, and the one I was on coiled in ever-tighter switchbacks as it wound through the cold, deep forest. I accepted the rigors of the passage, however, partly because my car had four-wheel drive, but mostly because I had been promised that through the woods (which is the literal meaning of Transylvania) I would have a glimpse of a lost world.

"In Transylvania you will see a preindustrial, self-sufficient agricultural system," Jessica Douglas-Home, the slim, soft-spoken founder and chairwoman of the Mihai Eminescu Trust, assured me when I visited her London office. Since 1997, the trust, partnering at times with the United Nations Development Program, the World Bank, and the European Union (E.U.), has worked to restore and maintain the region's ancient villages, homes, churches, and, especially, agricultural traditions.

The region, Douglas-Home told me, is the very model of an integrated, sustainable world that consumes only what it can replenish, that treads lightly on its environment and leaves barely a carbon footprint behind. "When fuel shortages begin to make things bad for the rest of us," she said, "Transylvania will hardly have to cough."

With its small common grazing meadows and forested hilltops, this preindustrial landscape also holds great reserves of biodiversity, where rare wildflowers, insects, birds, reptiles, and amphibians thrive. According to the E.U., some two-thirds of Europe's threatened and endangered bird species are found on such lands. In fact, it was the very lack of efficiency and expansion-hand threshing, communal grazing, home processing-that shaped these ecosystems and ensured their survival. In Transylvania, a local biologist told me, it is nearly impossible to separate the landscape from the culture.

The creators of Transylvania's lost world were known as Saxons, descendants of settlers from northern Europe: Germanic and Franconian miners, tradesmen, farmers, and knights who migrated to the region in the twelfth century. (Legend has it that their forebears were the children the Pied Piper led out of Hamelin.) Granted near-autonomy over the region by King Geza II of Hungary -- Transylvania was then, as it would be time and again, part of the Hungarian empire -- the Saxons lived in small villages huddled along valley streams. Each household had a horse, a pig, a cow or two, and a garden. All shared the common grazing lands. Ensconced in these river valley refuges, the Saxons retained their Luxembourgish dialect (more Old German than modern), upheld their Reformation religious zeal, preserved their distinctive architecture, and managed to remain apart from the misrule that characterized Balkan geopolitics.

The effort to preserve these Saxon lands has become all the more urgent since Romania's accession to the European Union in January 2007. E.U. regulations designed to standardize and modernize farming methods, milking and dairy production, as well as the breeding, grazing, transport, and slaughter of cattle, have created difficulties for small farmers throughout the E.U., but especially in countries such as Romania, Bulgaria, and Poland, where subsistence farms number in the millions. For many of these farmers, membership in the union is proving to be, as one writer put it, a "Trojan pig," a once welcome gift that has released market forces that could decimate the region's small, sustainable economies.

If, as Douglas-Home believes, these farmers are the last, best hope for preserving "a way of life which produces food as a culture rather than a business," it has become evident that time, and the tide of globalization, are running against them.

"Although Romania has fertile agricultural land, vast tracts of forest, and a rich network of rivers," World Bank analysts wrote in a 2006 report, "its rural areas suffer from inadequate infrastructure and inefficient agricultural production." The average size of a farm in Romania is 7.5 acres, and two-thirds of the country's farms are smaller than five acres. The average size of an E.U. farm, by comparison, is 47 acres. But the larger problem, the World Bank said, is that Romania's farms have extremely low yields in crops, livestock, and, especially, milk production, on which most farm families rely for at least half their income.

"These farms need to be integrated into vertical supply chains," the report stated. "Efficiency can be increased only by adopting policies that facilitate the structural reorganization of agriculture by allowing inefficient farms to close down . . . and removing obstacles to the expansion of new and more efficient farming units."

Just beyond a crooked wooden marker that read "Crit," I turned from the main road onto a gravel lane that led to the village's only thoroughfare, a dusty clay street with neither a car nor a soul in sight. The one- and two-story hip-roofed houses on either side of the road had connecting lime-washed facades, some fading white, a few recently painted in pale blue and pastel orange. The houses were set back some 20 feet, separated from the road by a continuous swath of green lawn rife with dandelions. A knee-deep drainage swale ran along each side of the road, bridged at intervals by wood plank crossings that marked the entryways to the houses. Most of the windows were shuttered. An untethered horse grazed. Geese with goslings scurried up and down the swales. Hens and roosters strutted about. The sun setting behind the green-pastured hills cast an amber glow over the entire scene.

Then I heard what sounded like a firecracker, and then another, and soon a lumbering procession of cows came into view, accompanied by roughly dressed young herders snapping long switches in the air. From another direction came a small herd of goats, scampering and baying. A horse-drawn cart carrying herders seated among the hay bales in the back came cantering through. In 20 minutes rush hour had passed, the dust had settled, and quiet returned with the twilight.

It seemed not only a lost world but also an abandoned one.

The next day I met Caroline Fernolend, a town councilor in Viscri, and together we drove the three miles from Crit along a narrow, rutted dirt road to her picturesque village, its layout nearly identical to Crit's. Diminutive, dark-haired, blue-eyed, and voluble, she confirmed that no one lives in many of the homes in Viscri, Crit, or the 15 other Saxon villages whose restoration she, as Romanian director of the Eminescu Trust, is charged with overseeing.

World War II and the subsequent establishment of the Socialist Republic of Romania altered the Saxons' fortunes. Some were deported to the Soviet Union to assist in its postwar rebuilding; others were labeled Hitlerists and deprived of their political rights; others lost their land to "agricultural reform." Many sought to leave. Between 1979 and 1988, the West German government paid the government of Nicolai Ceausescu hundreds of millions of dollars in exchange for allowing up to 13,000 ethnic Germans a year to emigrate. As the Saxons left, Ceausescu began resettling the region with Romanians and Roma, or Gypsies. Later he conceived a grand "systemization" plan, under which Saxon villages such as Viscri would be bulldozed into oblivion, but his ouster and execution in 1989 put an end to that.

In 1990, with Ceausescu and the Berlin Wall both gone, the Saxon exodus began in earnest. Today Viscri has a population of some 450 souls, and only 26 of them are of Saxon descent. Five of those are members of Fernolend's immediate family.

In an effort to preserve sustainable farming and restore the village economies, Fernolend, along with the Eminescu Trust, has been promoting agrotourism. (During our time together I heard her converse with tour operators in Romanian, English, German, and French.) Tourists stay in restored homes, and a few families in the villages have refined their cooking and hospitality enough to host the visitors for meals prepared with local meats and agricultural products. While her efforts have begun to show results, she admitted that only so many projects can be supported. And increased tourism has done little to allay her larger concerns about the E.U. and its regulations.

Last Easter, Fernolend told me, herders found out they could no longer bring their lambs to market without a livestock transport license. Since most couldn't afford a license, they had to sell their lambs to someone who could, getting a lower price than the lambs would have fetched in the market.

"Soon our cows won't be allowed in the streets," she said. "What is now common land will have to be fenced. Animals will have to be milked by machine, but you need 10 cows to make a milk machine worthwhile. Most of these farmers have only two. They won't be able to sell their milk. Processing dairy products will require an expensive installation that one person can't afford."

As we walked through a haze of windblown white blossoms from the pear trees that line both sides of Viscri's broad main road, Fernolend explained how the legacy of Communist-era collective farms -- she served as economist/accountant for the local collective -- continues to have its effects. The farmers once again resent having their lives ruled by government regulations, and they remain suspicious of any effort that bears a resemblance to collectivized farming.

"Now we can think and say and do what we believe in, but Communism destroyed our trust in ourselves," she said. "When a Swiss guy offered to create a milk collective, people said, 'If my cow is better, why should I get the same price for my milk as everyone else?' But unless we cooperate, the E.U. regulations will destroy us.

"We are," she allowed, "between states of mind."

No one expressed those dual states of mind better than Rolf Roth, whom I visited in the village of Malancrav.

Roth is a huge man with intense brown eyes, a fullback's neck, and large, thick hands. His frame, even in his stocking feet, nearly filled the doorway to his house. In the barn abutting the house, pigs and piglets snorted and squealed in the mud and compost of their pen, pushing their snouts through the wire enclosure. Roth's wife, Dana, had just brought out some white cheese, airy as meringue, that she'd made at home with milk from the family's herd of 20 cows -- a large herd, by village standards, that enabled the Roths to sell cheese and milk as well as provide for themselves.

The E.U. regulations will soon make his life more difficult, Roth complained. And all of this is happening, he said, at a time when Romania needs to fund and promote its own dairy producers. "Romania does not produce enough milk to cover the necessities of Romania," he told me. "In Romania, in this land with all its milk, in this village children go without milk. Families can't afford to buy it."

While milk imported from other countries in the European Union might bring down the price, without government support, small-scale local farmers such as Roth will not survive. "And will we be able to compete with the cheeses brought in from abroad?" he asked.

But what, I asked him, about continuing to produce the way he always has, marketing his products locally and promoting them, as the Eminescu Trust and other nongovernmental organizations are trying to do, as traditional and organic agricultural products?

"Traditional agriculture? I don't know what that means," Roth said. "[These groups] will provide assistance for farmers who use traditional methods? But that itself becomes extra time and work, and we won't be able to compete on the market."

He pointed out that the regulations would still demand that his wife's cheeses meet new pasteurization and sanitary standards, which would mean purchasing licenses and equipment, and that all products be refrigerated when stored or transported. All expenses in time and money that he can't afford. "We're not ready for this," he told me. "For tourists it's nice to ride through green valleys. It's nostalgic. But not for locals who have a pig and a cow and have to survive on what they can produce on half a hectare [a little over an acre] per family."

In a written response to an e-mail inquiry, Michael Mann, E.U. spokesman for agriculture and rural development, acknowledged the problem. "Concerns as to the ability of small farms to meet genuine E.U. requirements are not without foundation."

Mann's view is very similar to the World Bank's: there are simply too many small farms for them all to survive. Small farmers "need to develop alternative part-time or even full-time non-farm activities in the area where they live."

To help them through the transition, the E.U. has increased funding to its rural development programs for its newest members. Romania alone will receive more than eight billion euros ($11.7 billion) over the next six years. All of these programs, however, depend upon the national government for implementation. And the Romanian government has had its own difficulties reaching those farmers in need. Raluca Barbu, who oversees the World Wildlife Fund's rural development and conservation efforts in Romania and Bulgaria, told me that only some 50 agricultural advisory offices have been set up to help the more than 1.5 million small farmers in these two countries. Most of the offices, she said, are located in major cities, too far for many of the farmers to travel to.

Mann hopes for the development of "non-farm activities," but that is not what has happened. Many young people simply leave the farms for work in the cities, in Romania and elsewhere in the E.U. Since 1990 the population of Romania has declined by 1.5 million, or 6.5 percent, the combined result of this exodus and a low birth rate. By 2050, the population is expected to decline another 16 percent.

Along with this loss of human capital, Barbu said, the abandonment of grazing meadows and pastures has brought the loss of vital habitats and their biodiversity. (This may seem counterintuitive, but ancient farming methods meant that rare wildflowers, reptiles, and amphibians were able to thrive on this land.) This is happening in areas such as Transylvania and the Carpathians, which the E.U. itself has designated "high nature-value farmland." A 2004 report by the European Environment Agency found that abandonment of small farms was a prime cause of biodiversity decline and that "current policy measures appear insufficient to prevent further decline."

Under E.U. legislation, an umbrella organization called Natura 2000 oversees a large number of natural habitats designated for protection. In Romania, and in Transylvania in particular, this has provided a nascent environmental movement with a mechanism for challenging plans for government and private development.

At the streamside dacha of dentist/naturalist/activist Alex Gota (who served up local ham, cheese, and homemade schnapps), an enthusiastic group of local biologists and conservationists peppered a Natura 2000 official with questions in Romanian and English about how to deal with proposed highways and tourist developments, how to keep foresters from clear-cutting, how to control strip-mining, and how to fund their own projects and research.

Erika Stanciu, the local Natura 2000 director, explained to me afterward just how new this all is. Not only is it a novelty to be able to question development plans, but it is also unprecedented for the government to have its plans questioned.

"The government is overwhelmed by all the changes. It is overwhelmed by this transition. We are all overwhelmed."

Over the next days I did see several projects that gave me some tenuous hope. In the village of Nemsa, Julius Comisa, a Roma farmer, heads an association of villagers that received 150 goats three years ago from the Center for Research and Ethnic Relations, a Roma organization in Cluj, with the stipulation that the goats not be slaughtered or sold but raised to produce milk and cheese. Since then the association has expanded to include 30 families, both Roma and non-Roma. The group has broadened its efforts into community development, applied for funds to supply the village school with indoor toilets, and received 15,000 euros ($21,700) to build a milk collection center.

Just south of Crit, British landowners have built up a herd of 350 water buffalo, grass-fed and organically raised for milk production. Although water buffalo are generally considered too ornery for anything but hand milking, the owners have set up a successful machine-milking operation that they will soon expand.

To the north of Crit I visited a model farm managed by World Vision, a California-based Christian organization that has been working for several years in Eastern Europe. Farm manager Maria Todea told me that farmers who complete the World Vision course in small-farm management receive a diploma that allows them to apply for financial assistance from the government.

In the village of Malancrav, on a rise above a restored church, I walked up a terraced hillside among hundreds of apple trees in blossom. The air was fragrant and humming with bees. The orchard was purchased by the Eminescu Trust and has begun producing and bottling its own organic apple juice.

The Suciu family, at whose home I dined each night, has taken an entrepreneurial approach to all the organizations working in Transylvania. They opened their home to the trust's tourists. They accepted a pig from World Vision. Their son and daughter-in-law worked on the water buffalo farm and would be leaving for Bucharest the next morning to display their artisanal Transylvanian cheeses at a slow-food festival in the capital.

Given enough time and money, such projects might sustain the traditions of this lost world as it makes its transition into a new world economy. But the realities of poverty, the very evident missing generation that has already moved on, and the intransigence of both the E.U. and the Romanian bureaucracies have made the circumstances seem dire and intractable. The shepherds tending their flocks on emerald meadows, the herders guiding their cows along ancient paths, seemed destined to become anachronisms in the service of tourist nostalgia.

Even so, Lucian Holban told me in his office in the citadel of Sighisoara, "I am not pessimistic."

A short, slight, balding man with a trim mustache and goatee, Holban is a geochemical engineer whose former employer, GeoMed, asked him to come out of retirement and catalyze sustainable development efforts in 16 localities and two towns, an area of some 310 square miles with a population of 56,000. His territory is what the E.U. calls a Local Action Group Initiative. As its director, he says, his job is "to create conditions for projects that will build infrastructures for future development." When he sees likely opportunities, his challenge is to get them funding.

"I am old enough to retire and enjoy my pension," Holban told me. "But this work keeps me active and interested and confident about the future."

This is not easy, considering he works on his own most of the time and has trouble covering basic office expenses, let alone finding the equivalent of $10 a day to pay an assistant.

And even if he gets E.U. funding, the larger question is, who will make use of it? "All the young people from these villages who are supposed to rebuild them, to take part in all the new projects, are going away to work abroad," he said.

For Holban, tourism is not the answer. While it can create "small islands" of "a kind of utopia" that are interesting to tourists, he said that "more than these small islands is not possible." Only foreign investors can afford the cost of restoring and heating the houses, and Transylvania is already being touted in Britain as the best "next place" to purchase property abroad. A British woman I met in Crit had been so taken with riding horseback across the fenceless, Gainsborough landscape that she purchased a house in the village four years ago for the equivalent of $3,000. After renovation and restoration, she estimated it was now worth five times that. Still very cheap by standards in the rest of Europe, but the increase in property values will price it out of the market for many local residents.

What is needed, Holban said, is to give Transylvanians the resources they need to preserve the natural as well as the economic viability of their land.

Few people, I was told, had as much knowledge about the landscape as the biologist Tibor Hartel, who, with the help of the Eminescu Trust, was surveying the biodiversity of the southern part of the Transylvanian plateau. We met just outside of Sighisoara and began the hike he'd planned at a hillside cemetery crowded with early spring wildflowers. This place, he told me, had five years ago been slated for destruction. Roads and parking lots were to replace the oaks, and the ancient plain was to become Draculaland, a theme park designed to attract millions of tourists. The defeat of those plans by a coalition of local, national, and international groups was a first slim hope for Romania's environmental future.

As we climbed a well-worn trail through a forest of young hornbeam, oak, and beech, clearings gave us glimpses below of the walled medieval town of Sighisoara, whose warren of ancient streets sloped steeply toward the banks of the narrow Tarnava Mare River. Hartel's long strides-he is a tall, lean, Ichabod Crane figure of Hungarian descent who looks like (and is) a local schoolmaster-brought us quickly to the summit, where, with surprising suddenness, we emerged from the woods onto the level expanse of open grassland that is the Breite Plateau.

Only huge oaks, their trunks three feet and more in diameter and their dense and thickly branched crowns in early leaf, interrupted the view. These, Hartel told me, are some of the most ancient oak trees in Europe, 400 to 600 years old, a few perhaps even older, some stag -- headed with age, some scarred by lightning, several gutted by fire -- I stepped into the charcoal-black hollowed-out trunk of one and stood with plenty of room to spare-but all key to the survival of this now rare ecosystem.

But the landscape is not a natural one, he explained. The way in which it was farmed and grazed for a thousand years-field size limited by what a horse could plow and what a scythe could cut-created a mosaic of landscapes that enhanced biodiversity. Wildflowers could survive the scythe. Hilltop forests were maintained as buffers between grazing lands. Deer, bear, and even amphibians could move unhindered from one place to another.

We heard a cuckoo's echoing calls and saw signs in the trees of some of the nine resident species of woodpecker. Hartel kneeled beside a muddy pool that had formed after the previous day's rain in a depression made by a tractor tire and scooped up a handful of jumping frog tadpoles. In the depression next to it, separated only by the width of the tire tread, he pointed out an orgy of yellow-bellied toads: males latched on to females in ardent vernal amplexus. Transylvania, he said, probably holds the largest population of these toads in the E.U. Here they're often called St. George's toads, since their unkeh mating calls are heard around the time of St. George's Day, celebrated in Eastern Orthodox countries on April 24.

"If someone wants to see what it means to live with nature, they should come here," Hartel said.

But sooner, I thought, rather than later. The last foreign visitor Hartel had escorted through a Transylvanian forest was Britain's Prince Charles, whose interest in historic preservation had prompted him to purchase and restore a house in Viscri. What, I asked, was he like?

"He was very much like you," Hartel told me. "A very nice man who asked a lot of questions." That was, I thought, a diplomatic way to put it.

Now We Feel Better

Mon, 25 Feb 2008 12:55:53 -0600

Our Fall 2007 story "Canada's Highway to Hell" painted a grim picture of the impact of the tar-sands industry on the boreal forest of Alberta. But provincial premier Ed Stelmach says critics are misinformed. In January he said he was confident U.S. officials would agree that plans for the tar-sands project will meet federal standards for clean energy production. He made this promise as he walked into a meeting with Vice President Dick Cheney. Well, if it's good enough for Dick...

Invasion of the Alien Creatures

Molly Webster — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:41:00 -0600

Ecologists estimate that every six months a new invasive species begins carving out a spot for itself in the Great Lakes ecosystem. Many arrive as stowaways on shipping vessels that travel up the St. Lawrence Seaway, hiding out in ballast water until it’s discharged for cargo--leaving the aquatic invaders free to move about the continent. In 2006, one of the most lethal infectious diseases affecting fish populations, viral hemorrhagic septicemia, killed tens of thousands of fish in Lake Erie. Scientists believe it might have arrived in ballast water. Such losses are ruinous in a region that takes in $5.7 billion a year through the sport and commercial fishing industries. In the absence of federal rules to curtail tainted ballast discharges, in 2007 Michigan began requiring that ships treat their ballast water before releasing it in state waters. The shipping industry challenged the law in court; NRDC joined Michigan’s case, arguing that states have the right to enact their own standards. The case was dismissed in August, but NRDC is prepared to defend against the shippers’ appeals.