OnEarth Magazine Articles

Sweet News: New York City Dumps Beekeeping Ban

Crystal Gammon — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

New York City's underground beekeepers can come out of hiding. The Department of Health and Mental Hygiene voted unanimously today to lift a decade-old ban on raising honeybees within the city limits.

The decision means that beekeepers no longer face thousands of dollars in fines if their hives are discovered. It also means that aspiring beekeepers can look forward to starting their own rooftop and backyard hives -- legally -- for the spring growing season.

The change to the health code, which had previously banned honeybees alongside other "aggressive" animals such as lions, crocodiles, and pit vipers, will go into effect at the end of April.

"I've been abstaining for six years, just waiting for this ban to be lifted," said bee enthusiast Anna Thea Bridge, "so I'm just ecstatic after today's decision." Bridge has studied beekeeping as a hobby over the past few years. She now plans to start her own hive in Sunnyside, Queens.

Today's decision follows a February 3 public hearing where gardeners, arborists, and community activists supported a change in the beekeeping ban. No one spoke in opposition.

"City beekeeping will contribute to the pollination of plants in our parks, rooftop gardens, and community farms," said Vivian Wang, a litigation fellow with the Natural Resources Defense Council whose work has helped ban a pesticide that is potentially toxic to bees.

Wang has taken classes on beekeeping and is a core member of the New York City Beekeepers Association (NYCBA). She said bees need all the help they can get, given the threat of what's been called "colony collapse disorder" -- a mysterious condition wiping out honeybee hives around the world.

"Given the troubling trend of pollinator decline," Wang said, "it is important to legalize beekeeping and encourage people to learn about the critical role that bees play in our ecosystem."

The city's new rules will require beekeepers to protect both their hives and their neighbors by selecting locations that aren't a public nuisance and ensuring that bees have access to fresh, clean water.

It's important to teach new beekeepers to maintain healthy hives, said NYCBA President Andrew Coté. He doesn't want to see "cowboy" beekeepers starting hives and then abandoning them. Coté's organization provides an introductory course for beekeepers, as well as an ongoing series of meetings and workshops to help beekeepers hone their skills. (Learn more here.)

"We look forward to expanding our ranks," Coté said.

Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells -- Our Ride to a Renewable Future

Emily Voigt — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Recently I walked down to 255 Pearl Street in lower Manhattan, a couple miles south of where I live. I turned onto Wall Street, passed the New York Stock Exchange, and then proceeded to circle the same short block until a parking attendant confirmed that the address I was looking for no longer exists.

A clothing store now stands roughly where the world's first power plant once did. In 1882, at a time when Thomas Edison was being chastised by impatient investors and scoffed at by the press, he finally threw the switch here, illuminating hundreds of light bulbs along Wall Street. Within a decade, the early foundations of our modern-day power grid had been laid, and more than a million bulbs shone across the country.

My walk was inspired by Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells -- Our Ride to the Renewable Future by journalist Amanda Little. It's the kind of book that makes sense of events and inventions you didn't even realize belonged in the same story. From shipping crates to electric cars to silicone breast implants, Little elucidates a topic as complex and tangled as the wires now running beneath New York City.

I'd be tempted to insert a pun here about how Little has pulled off something big, if I were into the kind of quippy subheadings found throughout the book ("It's a Sprawl World," "Big Butz," "The Writing is on the Wal-Mart"). But I think Power Trip sells itself short with this cutesy packaging. It's a friendly, but not a faddish, book -- an expansive, impressively well-researched history that explains how we came to live in the world that we do and where we might go from here.

Beginning with a long look at fossil fuels and the infrastructure they've generated, Little takes us to an "ultradeep" offshore oil rig in the Gulf of Mexico, an enterprise she finds "doggedly ambitious, but also seemingly desperate -- like an addict forcing a syringe into the earth's innermost veins." She recalls a time when the United States was "the Saudi Arabia of the world" in terms of supplying petroleum, then traces how oil "evolved from a fuel for war machines to a catalyst for war to a lethal weapon" on September 11th.

One of the best scenes in the book is her fond rendering of the 1945 maritime meeting between President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the king of Saudi Arabia, Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, during which the two men forged an alliance that would shape the modern world. (Ibn Saud brought along a herd of sheep, slept under the stars, and, having a lame leg, bonded with FDR over his newfangled wheelchair.)

Much of the narrative is cast as a personal quest for understanding. This works well at times, such as when we descend with Little to inspect the electrical grid beneath New York City, where "hot flashes" have been known to fuse contacts to eyeballs. But it seems contrived in other spots -- at Talladega in Alabama, for example, where Little has an epiphany that NASCAR is "more universally American -- more me -- than I'd ever realized."

Even though Little catalogs the contents of her office, her home, and her salad in greater detail than necessary, her message about the astonishing ubiquity of petroleum is a powerful one. Our dependence on oil goes far beyond fuel. We touch more plastic than we do skin. And thanks to fossil-fuel-based fertilizers -- arguably the most significant invention of the last century -- we even eat oil.

In the end, Little argues that the same ingenuity that got us into this mess can get us out of it. The last part of the book canvasses alternative energy technologies, including Scotch Tape-thin batteries made of viruses and "nanoink" that can be printed on any surface to convert sunlight into electricity (think pants that charge your cell phone while you wear them). To glimpse what the future might look like, she visits the new Bank of America skyscraper in Manhattan (where the rooms can tell if they're occupied by measuring CO2 levels) and a zero-energy housing development in Tennessee -- "an experiment that could have implications for American daily life almost equal to those of Edison's Pearl Street dynamo."

It's heartening that the great inventor himself anticipated the end of fossil fuels. "This scheme of combustion to get power makes me sick to think of it -- it is so wasteful," Edison told a visitor to his laboratory around 1910 (not 1931, a minor error in the book*). "You see, we should utilize natural forces and thus get all our power. Sunshine is a form of energy, and the winds and the tides are manifestations of energy.

"Do we use them? Oh no! We burn wood and coal, as renters burn up the front fence for fuel. We live like squatters, not as if we owned the property."

* On page 252, Little quotes Edison as saying this in 1931. The source in her notes, however, is Little Journeys by Elbert Hubbard, a book published in 1913. If you have a look at the chapter on Edison, you'll see that the quote is actually from an interview that took place when Edison was 63. Since he was born in February 1847, that would make the interview in 1910, unless it's very early 1911.

Battle to Preserve Baja’s Whale Nursery Celebrated, but Threats Remain

Dick Russell — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

"....for there is no splendor greater than the gray
when the light turns it to silver." -- Homero Aridjis, The Eye of the Whale

Ten years ago this month, the Mexican government -- under intense pressure from environmentalists -- announced it was canceling a proposed industrial salt factory at Baja's Laguna San Ignacio. The lagoon serves as the last undeveloped birthing habitat for the eastern Pacific population of gray whales, which were hunted almost to extinction a century ago and continue to make a tentative recovery. (Their Atlantic cousins succumbed to overhunting and have disappeared from the seas.)

The sudden and surprising decision to scrap the saltworks was a landmark victory for U.S. and Mexican environmental groups, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, which had been fighting for five years to stop the joint venture between Mexico and Japan's Mitsubishi Corporation. When many of the key participants in that fight gathered last week for a reunion at the remote lagoon, it was clear that ongoing efforts to protect this unique part of the Vizcaíno Biosphere Reserve were having a profound impact.

At game parks on the African Serengeti, humans go to view wildlife - but here in Baja, the wildlife comes to you. The gray whales were out to greet everyone, some 200 strong for twice-daily whale watches, exhaling a heart-shaped mist as they chuffed past the panga boats. They sometimes approached close enough for onlookers to touch or even rub the baleen inside their mouths. "A magical gift, transcending time," as Mexican poet and environmental leader Homero Aridjis described one two-hour visit on the water.

Gray whales make one of the longest migrations in the animal kingdom, traveling 5,000 miles or more from sunny Baja to the cold Arctic, where they feed during the long days of summer. But they mate and give birth primarily in a few special lagoons along the Baja coast. The two other habitats they frequent have already seen considerable development, including a large saltworks. San Ignacio alone remains pristine. Had the salt project gone forward here, it would have meant a mile-long concrete pier across the whales' migratory path and diesel engines pumping 6,000 gallons of sea water per second into 116 square miles of diked salt evaporation ponds. Given the many other threats facing the 17,000 remaining gray whales -- from deafening Navy sonar to climate change impacts on their food supply -- industrial expansion into this nursery would likely have proven disastrous.

During the anniversary gathering last week, a symposium to discuss future steps for protecting the area drew a standing-room-only crowd of well over 100 people to one of the lagoon's nine eco-tourist campgrounds. "This past decade has been a watershed moment in the way we lived and perceived ourselves," said Josele Varela, president of the new Rural Association of Collective Interests and one of a number of local community members from among the lagoon's 205 families giving presentations.

In 2004, lagoon residents formed an alliance with some of the 36 other biosphere reserves in Mexico to exchange information. These are sites designated for their natural beauty to foster sustainable development. "With this alliance, we've been able to learn new ecological methods," said Raul Lopez. New projects at the lagoon include oyster aquaculture and an award-winning effort to grow and restore mangrove forests.

Such efforts by the lagoon's six ejidos (communal land cooperatives) have been bolstered by the Laguna San Ignacio Conservation Alliance, which is also comprised of five outside NGO's -- NRDC, International Fund for Animal Welfare, International Community Foundation, Wildcoast, and Pronatura.

"I think we're about halfway to where we want to be, in terms of increased protections for the lagoon," said Jacob Scherr, NRDC's director of international programs.The purchase of conservation easements now protects roughly 140,000 acres on the lagoon's eastern side, he said. "We've also gotten a commitment from the national government to preserve about 100,000 acres of federal lands on the other side of the lagoon."

However, as marine biologist Steven Swartz put it, "I think we need to remain vigilant." Mitsubishi and its Mexican counterpart, Exportadora de Sal (ESSA), still maintain the legal right to renew their proposal. A year after the saltworks project was halted, according to Scherr, "without any real fanfare ESSA renewed that concession for another 50 years. We became aware of this and are now in the process of trying to have it nullified."

Mark Spalding, director of the Ocean Foundation, which fiscally sponsors the Laguna San Ignacio Ecosystem Science Program, adds: "The land conservation easements and other land purchases have been very strategic, in hopes of making it extremely difficult for Exportadora to revive the project. But future oil or gas development is still a real risk here."

A proposal to improve or even pave the rough road that runs 37 miles from the town of San Ignacio to the lagoon is under consideration by Baja authorities. The local community would, of course, benefit from quicker access to fish markets and medical facilities. But many fear better roads would also increase the likelihood of development.

"They want to keep the flavor of a wilderness experience, because that's part of the allure," said Swartz. Scientists are also studying the potential noise impacts of construction, especially on the lagoon's bird population.

Swartz's ongoing census of the lagoon's gray whales found an increase during this winter's mating and breeding season, from 193 at the 2009 peak to upwards of 260 now. However, the number of mothers with newborns appears to have fallen. And although scientists are seeing fewer skinny whales than last year, concerns remain about the gray whales' food supply in the warming Arctic.

Due to climate change, the tiny crustaceans called amphipods upon which they customarily feed at the end of their 5,000-mile-long migration have disappeared from the traditional sites, forcing the whales to range even farther north. "So there is nutritional stress, and some whales have lost all their body fat," Swartz told the symposium.

Still, a decade after the saltworks was stopped, "the basic integrity of the area has been maintained," according to NRDC's Scherr. "At the end of the day, you can never preserve a place unless you have the local people with you. That's what's been such an important part of the story of Laguna San Ignacio."

Among the "friendly" grays this March, that was true cause for celebration.

Sunny Claim on Solar Power Checks Out

Ben Jervey — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Part of an occasional series. Read more >>

The Claim

"The fact is that every state in this country can produce at least 10 percent of its electricity from solar."
--Bernie Sanders, Senator, I-Vt. (source)

The Context

The independent senator from Vermont recently introduced clean energy legislation (pdf) with the goal of putting 10 million new solar electricity systems and 200,000 new solar water heating systems on American rooftops within 10 years. Despite what critics say, he doesn't think any state is too cloudy to benefit.

The Evidence

Utilizing rooftop photovoltaics alone, 10 percent of every state's electricity sales (using 2007 numbers) could be met, according to studies from the U.S. Department of Energy. The Energy Self Reliant States report (pdf) published by the New Rules Project nicely synthesizes data from a study produced by (pdf) the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, which evaluates the current technical potential of rooftop photovoltaics.

Besides telling us that one-tenth of each state's energy needs could come from rooftop solar, this report shows that 15 states could, right now, produce more than 25 percent of their electricity demand with the basic available photovoltaic technology. Experts caution that we still need to develop other renewable technologies to meet America's energy needs (including wind, geothermal and concentrated solar power), but rooftop solar systems could play a significant role in reducing the need for carbon-based fuels to produce electricity.

A map on Page 10 of the Energy Self Reliant States report (Page 15 in the pdf) shows that Sanders' confidence in the solar capabilities of each state is well founded.

The Verdict

The facts back up Bernie's sunny claim.

An Ancient Carbon Fix

Lindsey Konkel — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Sometime around 2000 B.C., the Amazon people discovered a trick for improving crop yields. They found that plowing the charred remains of burned food scraps, manure, and other organic waste into carbon-poor soil made plants grow better. What they didn't know was that they had also discovered a method of carbon sequestration that could benefit a future civilization: ours.

When allowed to decompose naturally, wood chips, yard clippings, cornstalks, and other types of organic matter give off about 90 percent of their carbon in the form of methane and carbon dioxide. But cooking them at high heat under low-oxygen conditions forms what's known as
biochar, which retains as much as 50 percent of the organic material's original carbon. Some scientists who study biochar, including those at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, argue that we could theoretically dial back global warming by turning plant waste into biochar and mixing it into soil.

The British company Carbon Gold is among the first to try to cash in on biochar's promise. Though neither the United Kingdom nor the United States has implemented policies that would promote biochar, as of February, Australian political leaders were debating plans to make biochar a centerpiece of the country's carbon-cutting effort.

How to Fix the World

David Berreby — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Life on a fault line should concentrate the mind, and make it serious. If you want to build an office tower in California, for example, laws require that you make sure it will stand up to a major earthquake. Over the years the specifics change, as both building technology and seismic research advance, but the general principle endures: politics, technology, and science should work together to protect people's lives.

Imagine, though, what earthquake preparedness would be like if it were handled the way American society deals with climate change. There would be little debate on the real choices ahead, but plenty of "debate" over the "alleged scientific proof" that earthquakes are actually real or that humans can do anything about them. Deniers would trot out one or two dissident seismologists to claim (falsely) that there is no scientific consensus. The reality-based community would take the bait and claim (falsely) that all scientists agree about everything. In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore states that there are 930 papers that agree on human-made climate change and zero that dispute it. But as the climatologist James Hansen recently noted, "That's just not normal for science."

Instead of pondering probabilities and degrees of confidence, we have allowed our deliberative processes to turn the world's environmental crises into culture wars. Last December, for example, the biggest climate news concerned not scientists' data but their stolen personal e-mails. As the sideshows go on, the risk of global catastrophe keeps rising. The entire human population now lives on an environmental fault line. So why, when we debate what to do about global warming or long-term sustainability, can't we sound like grown-ups?

In The Essential Engineer, Henry Petroski offers an answer. Americans, he suggests, are deluded about what science is and how it works. We want high-tech ways to cope with the risks of (to use a list of potential worldwide disasters that Petroski himself quotes) "a modern day global famine; an astronomical event leading to complete or partial extinction of life on Earth; a hundred- or thousand-year severe storm, earthquake or volcanic eruption; a terrorist attack that can kill tens or hundreds of thousands of people, or a climate change that could lead to total extinction of life on Earth."

Instead, Petroski argues, American politics and culture prepare citizens for a fantasy world in which science eliminates all uncertainty, predicts the future perfectly, and provides technical solutions untainted by politics and money. "Conventional wisdom is that science is sure," he writes. "In fact that is often the way its findings are reported." Of course, the actual language of science is nothing like this. Only crazy cult leaders tell their followers that the next big earthquake will strike at 8:14 a.m. on April 12, 2016. The best scientists can do is to say there is a 46 percent probability that an earthquake with a 7.5 magnitude will strike Southern California in the next 30 years, and a "greater than 90 percent certainty" that human activities drive global warming. Those are impressive intellectual achievements, and we should be glad to fold them into policy debates. Instead, we want scientists to act like cult leaders. How did that happen?

The role of theoretical physics in the development of the atomic bomb, Petroski believes, led us astray. For a few decades during and after World War II, with physicists "almost running amok in political influence," it really did seem that abstract, all-knowing science was the root of progress, both for our understanding of nature and our ability to make airplanes, cell phones, and other useful stuff. In reality, knowledge more often flows from material progress. "The rocket came before the mathematical solution to the problem of rocket flight," Petroski notes. "Inventors seldom have the patience of scientists."

From steamships to pasteurization to refrigeration to the earthquake-resistant Golden Gate Bridge, the typical history of invention belongs to practical people trying to make things that we can use, building on what has come before. Revolutionary leaps are rare, unintended consequences ever-present, and a certain amount of failure is inevitable. Indeed, Petroski writes, it is failure that teaches inventors how to improve.

The people plodding along this path don't refine beautiful theories or wait for perfect insights. They just get things done. Approvingly, Petroski quotes a "frequently cited” definition of structural engineering: "the art of assembling materials whose properties we do not fully understand into arrangements we cannot fully analyze to support loads we cannot fully predict -- and to do so in a convincing enough fashion so that the public has complete confidence in the resultant structures."

The driver of progress, then, isn't pure science (which often brings up the rear, advancing thanks to the new instruments and data created by the practical inventors). It's engineering, broadly defined as the business of making things people can use out of what is available, with whatever knowledge is at hand, and accepting the constraints of politics, money, and human nature. "Engineers do not need to imagine the unimaginable," Petroski writes. "They have to imagine the manageable."

As a claim about the history of progress, this is an extreme position in a long-standing debate. (Do new machines foster new thought, or does new thinking lead to new machines? Surely it's a little of both.) And Petroski, a professor of civil engineering at Duke University who has written 15 books (counting this one) that explain the engineer's mind-set, lays it on thick. In The Essential Engineer, scientists merely know, but engineers do. Petroski's scientists are passive and innately pessimistic, content to study nature and think their impractical "out of this world" thoughts. But engineers are active, upbeat, and always useful. After all, Petroski writes, while scientists "tend to be more flamboyant than engineers" and "sometimes appear to think of themselves as special," it's the engineers who, though they have "few if any literary allusions or plays on words in their work," are "in a position to change the world, not just study it." If this makes Petroski sound as if he has a chip on his shoulder, let me hasten to clarify: it's a boulder, and it makes him, and his argument, look small.

The peevish tone is unfortunate, because the book makes a valuable point. Engineering as Petroski describes it is the human side of our science-based civilization. It involves all the mess and strife from which we dream that pure science is immune: incomplete knowledge, insufficient budgets, political trade-offs, fads, fears, and foibles. When we forget all this, we end up expecting inhuman perfection from scientists. We want to know exactly how climate change is happening and precisely what we can do about it. Hence the sorry state of climate politics: if you believe science can know everything, then the slightest uncertainty or disagreement can make science look like it doesn't know anything.

People who think too much of science, in other words, will end up thinking too little of it. So Petroski is right to encourage an engineer's grown-up perspective. But he goes too far, and it's not just in his self-indulgent grousing about the "separate and unequal" professional relationships of scientists and engineers. The Essential Engineer isn't an argument for correcting the imbalance; it's a call for reversing it.

On climate change, for example, Petroski believes we've had too much study and not enough action. It's not enough for scientists to do science, he says; they should also do engineering, or let the engineers do it themselves: "Scientists should either hand the problem over to engineers or engage not only in science relevant to climate change but also in engineering means to control it." But global warming is exactly the kind of problem for which his get-it-done, use-what-we-know solutions could be disastrous.

Like any good engineer, Petroski wants to plan our actions on global warming by adding up the dollars and cents and using what knowledge we have. After all, "engineering is all about designing devices and systems that satisfy the constraints imposed by managers and regulators." That leads him to accept without question the supposedly hardheaded, by-the-numbers reasoning of Bjørn Lomborg, the Danish political scientist who claims society should spend its scarce resources on problems other than climate change. Petroski quotes Lomborg as saying that "spending an extra dollar cutting CO2 to combat climate change generates less than one dollar of good, even when we add up all the economic and environmental benefits." These numbers have been disputed by economists, but there's a larger problem with this kind of analysis: it works only if we can be certain we know exactly how much good will result in 2030 from a choice made in 2010. In other words, it assumes that past experience is a good guide to the future.

Petroski, eager to accept the constraints imposed by managers and regulators, buys that premise without question. But climate scientists, whose discipline gave us the term "butterfly effect," know that the planet's natural history is nonlinear. Sudden shifts in global climate have occurred out of all proportion to their causes, and in those times the past was no guide to the future at all.

Before we try to engineer the climate, then, it's probably a good idea to learn more about what could go wrong. Hence, we're lucky we still have some people pursuing impractical knowledge instead of just making better refrigerators at a better price. Petroski prefers doing to knowing; he wants to roll up his sleeves and start geo-engineering. But a society that takes his advice to heart could end up not knowing what it's doing.

A Better (Mac)intosh

Lindsey Konkel — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Scientists and historians estimate that more than 14,000 varieties of apple have been cultivated in the United States, but over the past 100 years, much of that diversity has been lost as agriculture shifted its focus to large-scale production of just a few types. Today a mere 11 varieties account for more than 90 percent of all domestic apple sales. The good news is that researchers at the University of Arizona and the U.S. Department of Agriculture have recently identified 110 genetically unique types of apple on abandoned homesteads in the Southwest. The newly rediscovered heirloom varieties have survived for decades in the arid Southwest, indicating that they may contain genes that confer resistance to dry weather -- an important trait that could come in handy for apple breeders if climate change increases the frequency or severity of droughts.

Water's Edge

Robert Sullivan, Diane Cook, Len Jenshel — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Photographs by Diane Cook and Len Jenshel, text by Robert Sullivan

To know New York, or at least to experience it, the tourists often start at Times Square, with its theaters and shows and chain restaurants that offer out-of-towners what they expect (and pay) to be surprised by -- the hot dog, the bagel, the Broadway spectacle, in the intersection of glass and stone-covered skyscrapers. The native starts at the water. Because if you want to get to the physical, historical, and even, I would argue, emotional essence of the city that is packed with eight million people, you head to the water's edge, or edges -- all 578 miles of them, all as close as they are far away. These are the places where New York, even if you think you know it, changes before your eyes, where the city seems less concrete and more dynamic, where you are never sure what is flora and what is fauna, or what is natural and what is not.

As is well known, the shoreline of New York City is back. Where did it go? A quick synopsis: in the mid-1800s the waters of New York become a place where swimming involves navigating trash and dead animals, primarily horses, which are tossed in whole. The shoreline is the place for docks, obviously, as well as sail makers, oystermen, printers, tanners, sailors, and the refuges of sailors. Sewage treatment begins around 1900, but the pace of sewage production (i.e., urban life) increases. Sewage treatment can't keep up and is then overwhelmed by all the other things we begin to pump into the water, especially after World War II -- namely, chemicals. At this point the water gets really bad, and the people who deal with it directly are those who have no choice: the powerless, the poor, and the marine industry, which begins to struggle, then nearly dies off.

In the 1960s comes, first, the idea that the river is polluted and, second, that it does not have to be. In the 1970s comes the Clean Water Act. In the 1980s, in response to the act, comes clean water. In the 1990s little creatures begin to jeopardize the wood in the old piers, a good problem as far as water quality goes, and the bigger creatures (i.e., us) begin to turn around and face the rivers and the harbor, the kills and the bay. It is a long and tortured story, but Westway, which was once to be the great modern interstate along the Hudson, on the West Side of Manhattan, became instead the Hudson River Greenway.

And yet still, to this day, no one really knows exactly what is on the water. No one has really explored all of the 578 miles, not even the Shorewalkers, who walk the watery circumferences of the city, who see a lot of the shore. (Their motto: "See New York at 3 m.p.h.") Even the people who tell us about the edges in various official capacities and subsequently make bold plans for them may not be certain about what is there. In fact, the 578 miles themselves are not a certainty. Municipal legend has it that it was Mayor John Lindsay who, in groping for the precise number of shore miles at some harried moment in the 1970s, asked his staff, who took string to map to come up with -- quick -- 578!

Into the breach of visual, statistical, and other, more visceral awareness jumped Diane Cook and Len Jenshel, photographers who went, in some cases, where few New Yorkers had gone before. Cook and Jenshel are married, and although they have separate careers, they have worked together on many projects: photographing aquariums, volcanic hot spots, and, most recently, glaciers, floating on water, ethereal portraits of what, despite their solidity, seem like about-to-vanish ghosts. Jenshel works in color and was a pioneer in what is sometimes called the New Color Revolution of the 1970s. Cook works in black and white. They met in 1979; the story involves cannoli and an Italian pastry shop in Poughkeepsie, New York. They married in 1983 and began collaborating in 1991. Cook was born in New York City but grew up in Indiana, spending summers on the beach back in New York. Jenshel was born in Brooklyn and grew up in Queens. In 2002, Cook and Jenshel received a grant from the Design Trust for Public Space to document the city shoreline. They came away from their initial forays feeling as if they had just seen new-found land.

"When we first started the project," says Cook, looking through work prints one afternoon in the Flatiron District of New York, "we would show the pictures to friends who have lived their whole lives in New York, and they would say, ‘Where is this?' "

"They would also say, ‘Where are the people?'" Jenshel adds.

"So that convinced us to do this," Cook says.

This is a full-blown exploration of the city shorelines, and the result is a series of photographs that remind us of the importance of what we can't see, of the importance of the edge, of those places that are not quite water and not quite land, that are not inhabited but are not uninhabited either -- places in between. In a time of binary operations, of developed or not developed, of land that is deemed either good or bad by the powers that decide, these photos taken together are a tonic of mesmerizing ambiguity, celebrations of the borders between New York City's land and sea.

The urban waterfront often seems dilapidated, but it is also being vigorously reinvented, in some cases by view-greedy developers and by politicians hoping to fund their campaigns with the money that, until the crash, was associated with builders of luxury condos and pricey hotels. But in other cases the landscape is being redeveloped by people who want to create sustainable futures, and the water's edge is the place to see the importance of the relationship between cities and sustainable ecologies. In a context of cities, nature is portrayed as the green shoot breaking through the concrete. The shoreline is a good place to see things reversed: humans are the living thing that always turns up on a shore, to fish, to drink, to stand and ponder. The sustainable future is in the reimagination of urban spaces, with special attention paid to the urban wilderness, or wildness, to use a Thoreauvian term. The place where the water meets the land is always wild.

A few words on the methods of the photographers in filming the city's terra incognita, on their littoral trials and tribulations. There were suspicions to deal with, of course, immediately following 9/11, when anyone out alone might be reported to the authorities, many of whom are not as interested in documentary photography as they perhaps should be. Being a photographer on the water in New York almost by definition means you are close to a bridge or marine facility; whereas standing on the water's edge once could mean contemplation, now it is seen as suspect. Cook and Jenshel were eternal suspects. While working during the 2004 Republican convention, they were watched especially. "People followed us around talking into their wrists," Jenshel says.

"We developed this super-nice persona to take the edge off the hostile situations," recalls Cook.

The police weren't the only hazards. Newtown Creek is the tidal creek that separates Brooklyn and Queens and is emblematic of much of the waterfront: once rural, then overdeveloped, now regaining a foregone wildness that is as much about neglect as it is about the relentlessness of what we refer to as nature. This tidal creek was named for the town in the first settlements of Queens that was "new" around 1652. More recently, it has become known as the site of one of the world's largest underground oil spills, about 17 million gallons, which is 6 million more than the Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska. (Even more recently, New York State has seen the return of a Colonial-era apple species, the Newtown pippin; Erik Baard, an author and environmental activist, identified its pedigree.) Jenshel and Cook photographed the creek after a rainstorm, or what is euphemistically called a stormwater event, which means the water slicks with chemicals, street runoff, and the stuff from household sewers. The result was a beautiful color test of a photo by Jenshel, and three weeks of subsequent sickness.

Despite the health risks and wrist talkers, Cook and Jenshel's results are celebrations of a mystical emptiness, painterly studies of the awkward but ultimately hopeful intersections between the man made and the non–man made. Taken as a whole, their work depicts a sometimes tropical waterfront, a place of interpersonal engagement as well as overgrown complexity. The waterfront of the husband-and-wife team is a place that disputes, in other words, the seemingly overwhelming rush of cement-fueled box store and parking lot sameness, the race to clean and park-ify all that is shore. Their work is a portfolio of secrets. There are quarantine stations, sites long abandoned, islands commandeered by vines. Like the photographs themselves, the vistas from Staten Island are a balm: it is an island which performs the valuable service of providing New Yorkers with perspective on the rest of the city, lest we forget that New York is a port, is an island chain, is (even before global warming raises the sea level) nearly at sea. In highlighting broken reeds (the wetlands-destroying phragmites) and seemingly discarded vessels, their photos give a sense of the intimacy of these places, the spiritual importance of entropy. Broad Channel is the only inhabited island in Jamaica Bay, a wildlife refuge within the Gateway National Recreation Area. Houses are built on stilts. The feel of the place is, like the feel of City Island in the Bronx, more like Maine, or a fishing village on some other part of the New England coast.

Broad Channel and City Island are not fancy places. On City Island, the restaurant once owned by the late Tito Puente, timbales player extraordinaire, takes the place of a Starbucks. It is true that murders and innumerable other crimes have happened in our marshlands, but then so have untold moments of personal reflection, of stillness -- moments of water- and sky-draped unmomentousness that purify the emotional watershed. Cook and Jenshel give us the ubiquity of sky from shore and the joy of ruins, which take on the significance of religious artifacts in a city and a country that are wondering how to proceed industrially. In fact, plans for the waterfront were part of the reason they went to particular places to photograph. At the beginning of the decade past, New York's shoreline was full of places that had been marked for large-scale Olympic development. These were places that the Olympic hopefuls considered useless and dead and of little or no value. (The Olympics plan is currently dead itself.)

"Some of what drew us to certain places was, okay, this is going to be, say, an Olympic rowing place -- well, what is there now?" Cook recalls.

"It was annexation," Jenshel says.

In the end, this is what Cook and Jenshel's photos do. They assert a public ownership and denote the valueless as valuable. The photographers are like explorers who, rather than claim the land for the king or queen, claim it for all, claim it for its trodden but still unspoiled beauty, claim it for reconsideration, perhaps, by you or me. Oftentimes the people who are already in the area don't need much help in this regard. You don't need a degree in urban planning to know that value is not necessarily added with nice hotels or ballfields made with plastic grass and black rubber dirt.

"At one of the meetings," Jenshel says, "someone got up and they said, ‘You know, sometimes we just want to walk out on a patch of dust and sit out under a tree and that's enough.' And that really struck us."

"I find those places beautiful," Cook says.

"And transformational," says Jenshel.

Drop by Drop

Crystal Gammon — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

With mounting pressure on the planet's freshwater supply, many regions, including the western United States, are seeing their traditional sources of water dry up. "We've already tapped all of our major water supplies," says Doug Obegi, an attorney with NRDC's western water project. "Rather than taking more water out of actual rivers, California has created a 'virtual river'" through efficiency, recycling, and projects such as roadside gardens and green roofs, which help filter stormwater and preserve groundwater quality.

The virtual river got a big boost last November, when Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a law setting the nation's first statewide water-efficiency goals. The legislation, championed by NRDC, aims for a 20 percent average per-capita reduction in water use by 2020 throughout all of California's urban water districts.

Some of the new efficiency measures will be quite simple, Obegi says. Charging for water by volume, for example, can increase efficiency dramatically. Some water districts plan to meet the goal by offering rebates on water-efficient clothes washers, showerheads, and toilets, as well as incentives for landscaping with drought-resistant plants.

Water districts that don't comply with the new law will be barred by the state of California from applying for grants and loans -- a huge disincentive. "Overall," Obegi says, "this law gives us a lot of the tools we need to get started."

NRDC: Finding the Right Place

George Black — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Johanna Wald is a senior attorney in NRDC's San Francisco office and an expert on the use of public lands.

The Obama administration is committed to large-scale renewable energy projects. But this raises a fundamental question: Where will they go?

Like any large energy project, they will have significant impacts. Utility-scale solar projects typically require thousands of acres of land, which is frequently graded and denuded of vegetation. Once these plants are built, electricity generation will be the sole use of the land-and they will be there for a very long time. Wildlife habitat will be gone, and so will the values of open space and wildness. In addition, depending on the technology and the location, solar projects can use a lot of water, a very limited and precious resource in the West. They will also require major new transmission lines that will cross public lands.

There's a lot of debate among environmentalists as to the wisdom of these large-scale projects. Where does NRDC come out on this?

The heart of the debate is over what is the role that utility-scale projects should play in meeting our renewable energy needs. Many environmental activists believe that rather than relying on large-scale projects located in remote areas, the focus should be on smaller scale "distributed generation"-generating power locally on homes and industrial rooftops-along with a greater emphasis on efficiency and conservation. As the longtime leader on the latter two topics, NRDC of course agrees that they must be the foundation of our new energy economy. We also agree that distributed generation will be make an important contribution to meeting our renewable energy goals. But at the same time we are convinced that we will also need some level of utility-scale generation in order to get a significant amount of renewable energy on line quickly, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as well as to promote a more sustainable energy future. But of course all these projects must be sited carefully, and none of them should be located in places with unique or sensitive resources.

What is the current status of development plans on public lands?

The key to getting the renewable power we need on line in a timely fashion is to ensure that development occurs on lands that not only have good solar resources but also low or relatively low environmental values. They should also have the necessary infrastructure already in place. To its credit, the Department of the Interior has taken a promising approach to solar development on public lands. For designation as solar development zones, it is looking for areas with relatively low conflicts that either have or are near to existing transmission lines and roads. Concentrating solar projects in suitable areas will help prevent the proliferation of widely dispersed projects across our public lands, minimize the footprint of solar development, and reduce the need for new infrastructure, including transmission. It will also help developers by speeding up the permitting process for projects in these zones. In the short term, the department is looking to permit a number of renewable projects as a "downpayment" on the Obama administration's vision of the important role the public lands will play in the clean energy economy.

A lot of the concern about the placement of these large projects on public lands has focused on the Mojave Desert. Can you give us an update on what's going on there?

Hundreds of applications for renewable energy projects have been filed on public lands in southern California. Many of these are in highly valued areas, and their potential development is highly controversial. Some are located in the national monument that Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, has proposed, while others are on "critical habitat" for imperiled species. The Interior Department is focusing its efforts on a subset of these projects that have the potential to meet the deadline for funding under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. NRDC is working with a number of groups to ensure that the projects the department approves are the best of this subset.

NRDC in the News: Spring 2010

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

"'There's increasing concern that if we don't get it together in the U.S., we will lose the clean-energy markets and jobs and growth that come with [a carbon cap],' says David Doniger, policy director at NRDC's climate center."

--From "Climate Accord Suggests a Global Will, if Not a Way," time.com, February 2, 2010

"This star studded video from NRDC urging the Senate to act on clean energy legislation is brilliant. Do what Dr. Cornell West says and 'Tweet that.'” [To view, visit thisisourmoment.org]

--From "Best PSA Ever," RollingStone.com, January 29, 2010

"'A complete energy retrofit...could slice a home's energy consumption in half, according to Lane Burt, manager of building energy policy at NRDC. 'It's a win-win-win,' said Burt. 'It creates jobs, it saves energy, and it saves consumers money.'"

--From "When a Home Energy Audit Pays," CNNMoney.com, January 7, 2010

"‘The real sweet spot will be if China's e-bike explosion leads to the development of electric cars,' said Alex Wang of NRDC. 'China is probably better positioned to make this leap than any other country in the world.'"

--From "Putting the Brakes on Pedal Power," Washington Post, December 15, 2009

How To Wage War On Food Waste

Laura Wright — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Two Saturdays after Thanksgiving, I slept in. At around 11 a.m., I padded into the living room with a feeling of quiet contentment. My husband, Peter, had been up for a few hours, during which time he'd read the paper, made coffee, cleaned out the fridge, and taken out the trash.

Our refrigerator had been getting difficult to close, jammed as it was with two-week-old turkey scraps, mashed potatoes, Brussels sprouts, and other Thanksgiving leftovers that nobody had eaten, plus the wilting greens and vegetables that never became salad. There were partially full containers of sour milk, dried-out slabs of poorly wrapped cheese, and three half-full tubs of hummus. Peter had cleared it all out, and I was aghast.

That was my job, I said.

Peter stared back, perplexed.

I mean, my job, I insisted -- as in researching the environmental impact of food waste. Unfortunately, I had forgotten to tell him that to write this story, I'd be tallying up our own cast-off food items. I stood at the kitchen window, my forehead pressed against the cold glass, peering down into the airshaft where our apartment building's garbage cans are stored. At that moment, I may have been the only woman on the planet who was annoyed with her husband for cleaning out the fridge and taking out the trash while she slept.

Peter and I are part of a much larger problem. The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that Americans waste 30 percent of all edible food produced, bought, and sold in this country, although it acknowledges that this figure is probably low. Recently, two separate groups of scientists, one at the University of Arizona and another at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), published estimates of 40 percent or more. Add up all the losses that occur throughout the food chain, the NIH researchers say, and Americans, on average, waste 1,400 calories a day per person, or about two full meals.

As kids, we were all admonished to finish what's on our plate for the sake of those starving children in poor, faraway countries. Among environmental issues, however, food waste barely registers as a concern. Yet when we do the math, tallying all the resources required to grow the food that is lost as it journeys from farm to processor to plate and beyond, the consequences of our wastefulness are staggering: 25 percent of all freshwater and 4 percent of all oil consumed in this country are used to produce food that is never eaten.

Some 13 percent of all municipal solid waste consists of food scraps and edible cast-offs from residences and food-service establishments -- restaurants, cafeterias, and the like. That's about 30 million tons a year, or enough food to feed all of Canada during that same period. When all that food decomposes in landfills, one by-product is methane, which has 20 times the global-warming potency of carbon dioxide. Based on Environmental Protection Agency data, rotting food may be responsible for about one-tenth of all anthropogenic methane emissions.

Part of the problem is the heterogeneous nature of food waste -- there is no single culprit, just many diffuse sources that add up to a slow and steady bleed on the economy and the environment. Supermarkets discard misshapen yet perfectly edible tomatoes, for example, because they don't look perfect to picky shoppers; convenience stores cook too many hot dogs on snowy days when customers are scarce. Back on the farm, approximately 7 percent of crops are not harvested each year because of extreme weather events, pest infestations, or, more commonly, economic factors that diminish producers' willingness to bring their products to market: a bumper crop can reduce commodity prices to the point where the costs of harvesting are greater than the value of the crop.

But the biggest players in the food industry -- farms, processors, and supermarket chains -- are not the largest contributors to food waste. Compared with what we toss out at restaurants and in our own homes, the nation's supermarkets stack up relatively well. According to USDA statistics, in 1995, some 5.4 billion pounds of food were lost at the retail level, while 91 billion pounds were lost in America's kitchens, restaurants, and institutional cafeterias. In other words, food-service and consumer loss make up 95 percent of all food waste, which means most of the responsibility falls on those who prepare the food we eat, whether it's a homemade meal, a dinner at a sit-down restaurant, or the Egg McMuffin we gobble down during the car ride to work. How, exactly, those numbers break down is poorly understood.

"There has been very little done on consumer-level food loss," laments Jean Buzby, a senior economist at the USDA's Economic Research Service. Buzby maintains estimates for losses incurred from the farm to the market, but equivalent records for consumer losses do not exist. As a result, Buzby can't say how much edible food is lost in cafeteria-style dining halls versus mom-and-pop restaurants or, for that matter, any other place we scarf down a meal. As for what happens at home, Buzby explains, researchers have trouble quantifying food loss because some of it never enters the municipal waste stream. "We don't know what gets put down the disposal or fed to the dog," she says.

The squishy trash bags I ended up retrieving from the bins outside our apartment building illustrated the dilemma: not only are we largely unaware of the consequences of food waste, but we also have a hard time imagining that we waste as much as we do. The amount of turkey Peter and I threw out on one day amounted to 1,465 calories, or about seven servings. Add that to the approximately 780 calories' worth of mashed potatoes (homemade, with butter and whole milk) that I gathered up -- though considering how slippery the potatoes were in my rubber-gloved hands, I'm sure I didn't get them all. Plus the hummus, the milk, and the cheese. Statistically speaking, our throwaways were perfectly average: specialty items, plus fruits, veggies, and dairy products, which are quick to spoil, especially if bought in excess amounts. And although the tailings of our feast had left me with more wasted food than I would have tossed during an average week, the underlying reasons were the same: I didn't know how much food I'd need for our holiday dinner, and I tried out some new dishes that were not as popular as I had hoped.

I recounted my story to Kevin Hall, the lead author of the recent NIH study, and he laughed. It was a problem familiar to him.

"I eat the same darn thing over and over, and therefore I know how much to buy," he says. "I know I eat a pear a day, so once a week I can go and buy myself seven pears. But if I start changing it up or varying the size of the pears, I don't know what to do."

Hall and his colleagues refer to the "push effect," which is similar to the "wealth effect": have more money, will spend more money. "In the supersize-me world, people will eat more, but they won't eat all of what they are given," he says. "If we have all this excess in the supply chain, the system will find ways to sell it to you. They will push from the farm to your fork, and you will eat a little bit more, and you will throw out a little bit more."

Planning meals better, using leftovers creatively, and making just enough -- instead of too much -- seem like obvious, simple solutions. But they matter, Hall explains, because we don't have good solutions for dialing back the push effect. That's something he's trying to change. In May, he will gather with experts on food and waste issues to start to look for top-down fixes to the problem.

Consumers can do the most good by embracing the good old "Three Rs": reduce, reuse, recycle. Food recovery programs play an important role by collecting surplus food from supermarkets, dining halls, and restaurants and delivering it to food banks and homeless shelters, where it is badly needed. For apple cores, potato peels, and other inedible food scraps, there's composting-at home and, in a handful of places, on the municipal level.

I'm working on the first "R" (Reduce!) right now. For starters, I'm sticking to what I know in the kitchen, cooking dishes I know I can prepare in just the right amounts. Peter and I are ordering takeout less, which means fewer jumbo-size portions that get partially eaten and partially thrown away. I'm also spreading the word, recounting my new-found knowledge to others. And the more I talk, the more I discover that my friends are as frustrated as I am. They, too, seem to buy more than what they need, often in packages that bear baffling sell-by, use-by, and other food expiry codes.

At dinner not long ago I confessed my food foibles to my friend Sarah, who in turn lamented the frequency with which she finds herself confronted by a refrigerator laden with wilting greens. "Really," she said with a laugh. "Who needs that much cilantro?"

Keeping Us Safe from Toxic Chemicals

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Of the nearly 80,000 chemicals on the market today, only 200 have been tested for harmful effects. On September 29, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) administrator Lisa Jackson released a set of principles that will guide the much-needed reform of the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976 and increase public confidence in the safety of chemicals that are produced and used in the United States.

Principle #1: Chemicals should be reviewed against safety standards that are based on sound science and reflect risk-based criteria protective of human health and the environment....

The process of risk assessment has a checkered history. Some chemicals have been bogged down in the process for decades, despite clear evidence that they are dangerous. Meanwhile, people are still being exposed and harmed. We should have a quicker pathway to reduce human exposures to the most hazardous chemicals.

Principle #3: Risk management decisions should take into account sensitive subpopulations, cost, availability of substitutes, and other relevant considerations.

The requirement to consider costs could be a stumbling block to protecting sensitive groups, such as children. Other health laws, such as the Clean Air Act, explicitly state that health comes first. It's okay for the EPA to consider costs, but an analysis that pits children's health against economic interests would be a real mistake.

Principle #4: Manufacturers and EPA should assess and act on priority chemicals, both existing and new, in a timely manner.

There are dozens of chemicals we already know are bad for the public, the environment, or both. Think asbestos. For a long time, the EPA has been unable to ban most of its uses because of hurdles in the law. The EPA needs to be able to restrict or eliminate the use of chemicals that a lot of people are exposed to and that we know are dangerous.

Principle #5: Green chemistry should be encouraged and provisions assuring transparency and public access to information should be strengthened....

Currently, there are no incentives for chemical manufacturers to develop so-called green chemicals -- chemicals that are designed to be nontoxic to our health and to the environment. To create these incentives will be good not only for the economy but also for public health.

In Touch With My Inner Reptile

Kim Tingley — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

It seemed simple, how I found myself at the Watering Hole lounge in Sebring, Florida, beside the cage of a 14-foot alligator. Driving, I'd noticed a sign touting his size, pulled over, and entered a bar. The reptile did not flinch at my arrival; with my face inches from his, not a spark ignited the shiny black surface of his eyeballs. I resisted an urge to stick my finger through the cage mesh -- and began to wonder if I wasn't under the sway of forces more powerful than roadside advertising. Unreasonably, I wanted his recognition.

Why do we yearn to connect with animals? More immediately, why did I imagine that this cooped-up alligator seemed glum, in the way other humans believe, say, that their Chihuahuas enjoy wearing tiny sneakers to the mall? Tragedies abound that testify to the impossibility of fully taming and befriending members of another species. Travis, the chimpanzee that tore off a Connecticut woman's face last year, for instance, could also adeptly sip from a wineglass. Yet we persist in our efforts to understand and be understood outside our genus, Homo. Why?

In 1977 the novelist John Berger wrote an essay called "Why Look at Animals?" in which he suggested one answer: despite our differences, finding existential similarities to other animals makes humankind feel less cosmically alone. But pet ownership and animal attractions don't offer a communion with nature, he argued. Rather, they are evidence of society's complete withdrawal from nature -- relics of a bygone era when humans defined themselves in relationship to the other sentient beings with which they lived side by side. We can't truly "encounter" animals in captivity, Berger wrote, because they are merely reflections of ourselves.

That may be. But it isn't always so clear where our thinking ends and an animal's begins. Take my alligator. Though I knew his massive body housed a brain less hefty than a poker chip, I couldn't help but wonder what was going through his mind. Most likely, absolutely nothing: alligator thoughts are probably "like a dial tone," a zoologist once told the New Yorker. And yet, while unintelligent by our standards, crocodilians possess homing instincts that can return them to a pond of origin over a span of both months and miles. In captivity, alligators congregate at an appointed hour for regular meals. Despite a natural wariness of humans, they become bold if habitually fed, shy if frequently hunted. One Miami resident who kept an alligator named Gwendolyn in a backyard pool for years even swore his pet knew her name, came when called, and enjoyed the music of George Michael.

Behavioral scientists agree that familiarity with another necessarily breeds interpretation, by both parties. Empathy is the basis of all communication, but practiced between species it can also lead to disappointment. Once, when an alligator that had become a fixture in a neighborhood lake in Florida ate a little girl, a resident told the local paper, "I never thought these things would hurt you, but I don't know what they've got in their minds now." In his essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" the philosopher Thomas Nagel explains the problem: our imagination, constructed with human references, can't approach the experience of another being. A person endeavoring to envision what it is like for an alligator to be an alligator is picturing instead what it would be like for her to float in a lake with only her eyes above the surface, catch fish in her mouth, and weigh 500 pounds.

I did that for a while at the Watering Hole. I imagined how hopeless and bored I would feel living alone in a cage barely longer than my body. I couldn't help it: getting up to leave, I whispered, "Hey, I'm really sorry." Somehow, it was easier to accept that the alligator might feel bad than that he might have no-zero-feelings at all. Now I wonder if what I'd really wished him to have was an identity immune to my projections -- if it was a desire to provoke his independence, not relate to him, that tugged my hand toward his head. The alligator's ancestors had arisen in the Triassic; in him lived unfathomable stretches of time on earth. That humans had utterly subdued him, that I could look at him and see only myself, was, in a way, like the end of the world.

What's in an Empty Cage?

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

"We as humans go to great lengths to satisfy our desire for a connection with the natural world, especially in our interactions with wild and exotic animals," says Daniel Kukla, who took this photograph of an empty neotropical rainforest exhibit at the Prospect Park Zoo in Brooklyn, New York. But zoos, he says, "often obscure the conflicts inherent in maintaining and displaying captive wild animals." For his series Captive Landscapes, Kukla photographed the interiors of animal enclosures adorned with painted landscapes and plastic plants at eight different zoos across the United States. Kukla asks us to consider whether we create such scenes not for their educational value, but because they make us feel better about the animals' captivity.

Home Energy Makeover

Josephine Hearn — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Rich Manning is crawling through an attic, flashlight in hand. "See this?" he says, pointing a beam of light at a gap in the insulation. "They're losing a ton of money with all the heat coming out of here." Manning is conducting an energy audit, measuring how and where heat escapes from the house and making recommendations for more insulation, caulking, and weather stripping or for high-efficiency heating and cooling systems, all of which reduce energy consumption, bring down utility bills, and curb greenhouse gas emissions.

Bill Broglie, the home's owner, and his golden retriever, Meatball, listen as Manning explains his findings. "You'll need a foot more insulation up there," he says. The good news: it may cost Broglie nothing.

The energy audit is part of the Long Island Green Homes program, an innovative year-old project in Babylon, New York, that offers low-interest financing for home energy retrofits. The town covers the cost of the work, and the homeowner simply agrees to pay it back over time in monthly installments. The repayments are structured to be less than the projected savings on energy costs, so the retrofits more than pay for themselves. Another bonus: if you move, the remaining payments fall to the next owner, who also inherits the lower cost and greater comfort of a more efficient, less drafty home.

"We know people aren't going to come up with thousands of dollars for insulation," says Steve Bellone, the town supervisor. "And if they're thinking about selling, they're not going to make improvements that benefit the next owner."

In the United States, homes account for 20 percent of carbon dioxide emissions, mostly through electricity use and heating systems that run on natural gas and oil. Efficiency improvements, which can be completed in a matter of hours, can lower energy consumption as much as 40 percent. By 2020, implementing such retrofits nationwide could cut emissions by up to 160 million metric tons annually -- the equivalent of taking 30 million cars off the road -- while saving homeowners $21 billion in utility bills each year.

The Babylon program and a handful of similar projects around the country -- in places like Boulder, Colorado, and Berkeley, California -- are known by the acronym PACE, which stands for Property Assessed Clean Energy. The PACE model topples the traditional barriers that make homeowners reluctant to undertake improvements -- namely, the high up-front costs-and offers an enticing new way to spur energy savings and curb greenhouse gas emissions from homes.

"It's been tough to convince building owners to reduce their carbon footprint," says Greg Hale, a financial policy specialist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "The beauty of PACE is that it ties the cost of retrofits to the property rather than the homeowner."

In less than two years, the PACE model has gone from being the dream of a few forward-thinking mayors to a major policy initiative set to expand nationally. The program's appeal is simple: besides offering savings to home-owners, it creates green jobs for contractors and benefits the planet at no net cost. Manning, who has seen his auditing business increase tenfold in the past year, calls the approach a "win-win-win-win situation."

The PACE model is attracting powerful backers. Last October Vice President Joe Biden made PACE a key component of his Recovery Through Retrofit plan, citing the unrealized potential of home energy retrofits to create green jobs, especially among contractors idled by the real estate slump. So far, 14 states have changed their tax laws to allow for PACE programs, paving the way for some of the nation's major population centers to get in on the game. Already, Los Angeles, Milwaukee, New Orleans, New York City, and San Francisco have begun to lay plans for PACE-style programs.

The programs will vary from place to place, in part because of differences in tax and municipal finance laws. Some municipalities will issue bonds, some will secure financing from investment banks or other private lending partners, and, as in the case of Babylon, some will tap into special government funds. PACE financing is appealing to lenders because of its low-risk structure: in the event of a foreclosure, proceeds from the sale of the property would first be used to make good on delinquent PACE payments before satisfying mortgage debts.

Of course, drumming up consumer interest is a vital part of the program. In Babylon, town employees fanned out in public parks, at pools, and on beaches, offering residents reusable water bottles, bags, and beverage cozies in exchange for filling out questionnaires and learning more about home energy use.

Ria Muriello learned about the program in the local paper. An ebullient grandmother of five, Muriello went online to fill out a detailed questionnaire about her home -- from the number of chandeliers she has (four) to the age of her washing machine (10 years) -- and provided a two-year history of utility use. She spent $250 for an energy audit and was approved for $6,298 worth of weatherization, to be paid off over seven years with help from utility company rebates and federal tax credits. Contractors blew 12 inches of fiberglass into areas around her porch and stuffed four inches of dense-pack cellulose into the garage walls, along with other upgrades. The work, projected to save her $925 a year, was finished in a day.

Babylon has retrofitted nearly 300 homes in the past year, cutting annual energy bills and greenhouse gas emissions by about $1,020 and four tons of carbon dioxide per house.

Muriello, who was recently laid off, is happy with the results. "I'm not feeling drafts and my bills have gone down," she says.

Spotlight: Life

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

In its variety and drive to persist, life offers no end of surprises. Consider the Belizean bulldog bat, one of the dozens of organisms profiled in Life: Extraordinary Animals, Extreme Behavior, the companion volume to the Discovery Channel/BBC series. With its powers of echolocation, the bat can detect small fish just below the surface of a river and, using feet like grappling hooks, snatch them from the water. The seeds of Alsomitra metacarpa, a climbing gourd from Borneo, are the envy of aircraft designers. Each seed rests inside what looks like the transparent wing of a butterfly; it glides on the breeze, soaring, diving, and soaring again. Life is a carnival of marvels: African cheetahs to Antarctic sea anemones; dragon’s-blood trees to Komodo dragons. Earth is home to millions of species, of course, each the embodiment of eons of struggle and adaptation. In limiting its focus to a relative few, Life provides a detailed -- and panoramic -- study of the biodiversity we must protect.

The Fittest Will Survive

Lindsey Konkel — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Charles Darwin explained how species emerge and disappear, but he didn't know about genes -- the biological currency that makes evolution possible. Today we know that the more genetically diverse a species is, the more likely it is to survive various threats, such as a warming or shrinking habitat. Diverse populations are more likely to contain individuals that can pass on preferential traits, enabling a species to evolve and live on. Unfortunately, that doesn't always happen. Now Richard Gomulkiewicz at Washington State University and David Houle of Florida State University have developed a set of formulas that mathematically marry rates of habitat destruction, population change, genetic variability, and other factors, enabling them to predict whether a species is on track for extinction.

It's difficult for ecologists to factor evolution into their projections for a species' future habitat needs, Gomulkiewicz explains, adding that these formulas constitute a model that "tells you when it just won't be possible [for a species to avoid extinction]." The model could be refined and employed by field biologists in the future, and may one day help wildlife advocates and federal officials to prioritize scant resources and focus on imperiled species with better chances of survival.

Country's Vocal Advocate

Crystal Gammon — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Mountaintop removal, a destructive form of coal mining that levels entire mountains to expose the seams of coal within, has already destroyed more than one million acres of once-majestic Appalachian landscape and threatens the health of the people living there. Mining companies dump trees, debris, and toxic contaminants from destroyed mountains into nearby streams and valleys, polluting drinking water and devastating natural habitats. Country music legend and longtime NRDC supporter Emmylou Harris, a founding member of NRDC's Music Saves Mountains campaign, discusses how she and other artists are working to keep the "country" in country music. You can learn more at musicsavesmountains.org.

What inspired Music Saves Mountains?
Bluegrass, mountain music, and the country music that's popular today -- you can really trace it all back to the Appalachians, the people who settled there, and the instruments they used. In a sense, this is the mother ground from which this music came. It's really important that these artists -- musicians from different areas of music, but above all country music -- understand the terrible desecration that's happening in the Appalachians, especially in West Virginia and Kentucky. Beyond destroying the environment and the wildlife, mountaintop removal is devastating the people who live on the land. It's something that should be stopped -- stopped yesterday. Once people realize that this is going on in their backyards, I do think there's a good possibility that things will change. But we need to mobilize.

Which of the songs that you perform best expresses your feelings about this place?
There's a song called "The Green Rolling Hills of West Virginia" [by Utah Phillips], which is a poignant story about people who had to leave that area. It was written a long time ago, before mountaintop removal mining, but I hope that when I perform it, it will give me an opening to raise awareness.

What inspires your personal passion for the environment?
It's where we all live! I saw a great bumper sticker once on a vehicle in Nashville. It said, "We all live downstream." Anything that's done, anywhere in the world, can have negative consequences for everyone. We need to be aware that we're caretakers of this extraordinary world that we live in.

It's Job Number One

James Gerstenzang — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

When he established the senior White House position of assistant to the president for energy and climate change, Barack Obama created one of the most important and politically challenging jobs in his administration. He chose someone with long experience in climate issues and Washington politics: Carol Browner, the highly effective administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) from 1993 to 2001. Browner's mandate is to create jobs, enhance energy security, and combat climate change. That means integrating the work of a variety of federal agencies; forging cooperation among federal, state, and local governments; building partnerships with the private sector; and being constantly aware of how changing political dynamics in the nation's capital affect -- and are affected by -- the responsibility of the United States to be a global leader on climate change.

In a conversation with James Gerstenzang, Browner made it clear that comprehensive energy legislation, with bipartisan support, remains one of the administration's top priorities.

How are you going to get 60 votes for a climate bill in the Senate, given that you have not only opposition from the Republicans but disagreements within your own party?

It's more nuanced than that, because we've got John Kerry, Lindsey Graham, and Joe Lieberman leading a bipartisan effort to craft legislation that won't result in the same sort of squabbles that perhaps have existed previously.

If the price of getting 60 votes is to risk weakening the legislation, wouldn't it be more effective to simply act administratively?

Well, because of a 2007 Supreme Court decision, the EPA has authority [to regulate CO2 as a pollutant] under the existing Clean Air Act. The science proves that greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and welfare. The next steps in the process are the proposed rules, the first-ever greenhouse gas standards for cars. And what the president has said repeatedly is that we're going to follow the science, we're going to follow the law. But in the meantime, we want comprehensive energy legislation, because we need all the pieces of the puzzle.

The administration's pitch for climate legislation seems to be based on the economic arguments.

When we look at what's going to stimulate private-sector capital investments in the new energy future, it's comprehensive energy reform. That's where we are going to give the business community the predictability that allows them to make those investments. History is a perfect guide. Every time we have a debate, for example, about the Clean Air Act and acid rain, some industry says it absolutely cannot be done. We set a standard, or Congress sets it, or the EPA sets it, and guess what happens? American innovation and ingenuity find a cheaper, faster way to solve the problem. There are lots of people in the business community who will tell you that's exactly what is going to happen if we put a cap on carbon and set a renewable electricity standard. Then you will see the capital investment. And with that will come the jobs.

Any estimates on numbers?

Our latest figures show that by the end of 2009 the outlays and tax credits for clean energy saved or created 52,000 clean energy jobs. Rather than retrofitting a coal-fired power plant from the 1950s or 1960s people are going to be making the component parts of a clean energy future, whether it be the batteries for the new generation of vehicles, or the bio-fuels, or the wind turbines, or the solar cells. Those manufacturing facilities have to be profitable here in the United States, and the way to make them profitable, to guarantee them a market, is to set the standards. Germany has a huge percentage of the world's manufacturing jobs. Why did that happen? Because they had a clean energy policy, and so businesses were prepared to make the investments that created those jobs.

And what happens in Congress will also shape the attitude of business.

Yes, the second step would be comprehensive energy legislation, so there's absolute clarity in the business community as to what's going to be expected of them. I meet with business people every week, and lots of companies say they are sitting on making investments right now because they don't know what the rules are going to be. We have a lot of folks who believe we are in danger of missing out on the global opportunities for clean energy technology.

How much political capital is the president willing to spend on this, with everything else on his plate?

You know, you don't get the job to do the easy work. You get the job to do the hard work. When people said we couldn't do it in the House, the president went to work and we passed in the House. There were people who said he shouldn't go to [the U.N. climate conference in] Copenhagen. But he went and he made it a hugely important step forward on the global commitment to climate change. Now we need to do the rest of it and get a binding international treaty. The president has said repeatedly that this is one of his priorities, that it's absolutely essential in terms of moving our country forward in this global market for clean energy.

What's your overall assessment of Copenhagen, as you look in the rearview mirror?

We are very pleased with what we were able to achieve. It was, I think, a direct result of the president's personal engagement. To me, he really ended up being the person putting the deal together by working with the various groupings of interested countries: China, India, Brazil, South Africa, the coalition of African nations, Europeans. And I think we got things that we haven't gotten before, for example, commitments on transparency that are hugely encouraging.

Jonathan Pershing, the lead U.S. negotiator in Copenhagen, has raised the idea of focusing more on bilateral agreements and less on the U.N. process. Might that not isolate the United States from its natural allies, such as the small island nations, which are at immediate risk from sea-level rise, or the European Union?

We need to do both. The U.N. process is important because it gives every country an equal voice. But it's not our process. At the same time, we worked with China on some important bilateral commitments and similarly with India. The magnitude of the problem and the need for global action is such that we want to take advantage of all appropriate forums, using every tool available to achieve real reductions in greenhouse gas emissions.

In the past, China has tended to take a wait-and-see approach, to see what we would do first.

Well, we have taken tremendous actions over the last year. If you look at our domestic agenda, it starts with the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. A study was just published that shows we may have the best year ever in terms of investments in renewable energy. We recently announced $2.3 billion in tax credits for the manufacture of renewable components. So we're not just putting up the facilities, building the solar farms, the wind farms, the geothermal plants. We're also investing in the manufacturing.

If you look back at what the administration has done on global warming, what one thing would you change?

I think we've been very successful in using our executive authority, whether it's on appliance standards or the work going on around fuels. You have two ways to create change from a broader perspective: one is through the legislative process and the other is through executive authority, and I think we have moved very successfully on both fronts.

So no regrets?

Well, you always want to do more. If you do six efficiency standards, you want to do twelve. But we have to do these in ways that are defensible. Also, we inherited eight years of inaction. In the first year of an administration, a lot of what you do is framed and set by what the prior administration did.

Going into your second year, what's the one thing you see as essential?

Getting Congress to pass comprehensive energy legislation.

NRDC and the Big Apple

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

OnEarth spoke to Mark Izeman, director of NRDC's New York urban program, which works to protect the nation's largest metropolitan area.

Why should restoring the New York City waterfront be a top environmental priority?

For starters, it's the greatest untapped area of open space in the city. The shoreline is longer than the entire coastline of Cape Cod, but historically much of it has been walled off from the public. Second, revitalizing the waterfront must also be seen as a key element in jump-starting the region's new green economy. There are huge opportunities to create and preserve environmentally friendly industries, including the city's historic maritime industry.

Can you give us some examples of how the waterfront can help build a green economy?

I can think of two good examples. The first is the city's state-of the-art recycling facility, which is being built along the Sunset Park waterfront in Brooklyn. And the second is the ongoing effort to transform the historic Brooklyn Navy Yard on the East River into a green industrial park. Both of these projects will not only help create thousands of new jobs in green industries, but they will also help reduce city air pollution by using our barges and boats-instead of relying exclusively on trucks-to move people, goods, and recyclables.

How clean are New York City's waterways these days?

Well, over the past 40 years the level of pollution has declined dramatically in the harbor. But significant problems persist, such as toxic PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) in the Hudson River and dioxin contamination in the Passaic River in New Jersey. And, despite sharp reductions in sewage pollution since the 1970s, our waterways are still regularly contaminated by untreated sewage discharges from our antiquated sewer system. Indeed, every time it rains, millions of gallons of raw sewage and rainwater are discharged into the surrounding rivers and bays from hundreds of outfalls dotting the coastline. This lingering problem limits New Yorkers' recreational opportunities, such as kayaking and swimming. At the same time, the city's sewage treatment plants also need to be upgraded to remove more nitrogen from our sewage wastes. High nitrogen levels lead to algae blooms that harm fish and other aquatic life.

And what about eating fish caught off the city's coastline? Are they safe to eat?

Unfortunately, despite all the gains we have made since passage of the federal Clean Water Act in 1972, there are still significant health concerns with eating fish from the city's waterways. The biggest problem is PCB contamination, which comes from the more than one million pounds of PCBs dumped into the Hudson River by General Electric over a 30-year period. Because of this toxic legacy, New York State officials advise that any fish caught from the Upper Hudson should not be eaten. And officials warn that most fish species from the Lower Hudson should not be eaten more than once per week .

Letters from Our Readers: Spring 2010

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

My Kind of Town

In the quest for sustainable development, many U.S. metropolitan regions face obstacles similar to those in Chicago's seven counties. I hope your article "Redrawing the American City," by Laura Wright (Winter 2010), is correct that our approach could be a national model for how regions can guide development and infrastructure decisions. OnEarth helped reinforce our belief that there's no one-size-fits-all solution to how communities can meet these challenges. But the many needs they have in common -- for example, efficient infrastructure that contributes to economic development and resource conservation while letting people live nearer to where they work -- are prompting communities to work together toward a more prosperous and sustainable region. Cooperation at the local, regional, and state levels is essential for comprehensive planning to succeed, but federal programs are also key to promoting comprehensive planning in metropolitan regions from coast to coast, helping the United States compete more effectively for jobs in a global economy.

Randall Blankenhorn
Executive Director
Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning
Chicago, Illinois

As a resident of Blue Island, south of downtown Chicago, I can vouch for its easy walkability and bike-ability. I put more miles on my bicycle than on my car each year, mostly because I can actually get to grocery stores, schools, restaurants, shops, and local entertainment by bike. Transit options abound in our community: we have not one but two Metra lines running into Chicago. Access to cheap and reliable public transit helps people make the shift away from cars. Finally, one of our best assets is a true sense of community: neighbors know each other and look out for each other. Residents are remarkably civic minded. Good urban design fosters that sense of community.

posted online by Anonymous

Someone forgot to tell Wright that the unofficial motto of Chicago is "Where's mine?" While Chicago and other large cities, such as Cleveland and Detroit, have potential for infill to reduce urban sprawl, Chicago is hampered by government (city, county, and state) that is rife with corruption and pay-to-play politics.

posted online by Babs

New York, New York

"How Green Is My City" (Winter 2010), Douglas Rushkoff's review of Green Metropolis by David Owen, doesn't adequately take into account the life support of cities. New York City's water comes from 125 miles away in the Catskills; its food from Kansas, Florida, and the distant ocean; its energy from Appalachia, the Mideast, and subarctic Canada. Its garbage cruises the world like a ghost ship. And while they live in apartments and ride the subway, affluent New Yorkers do have second homes in Vermont and do vacation in Tuscany. All of these things increase Manhattan's ecological footprint far beyond its 23 square miles. Accounting for indirect effects and for total consumption is a fairer -- and necessary -- basis for urban/suburban/rural comparisons.

Robert Herendeen
Burlington, Vermont

And Then Some

Elton Glaser — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Slow moon on a windy night, and May
Rising in a hormone harmony,

In a wave of snakes sliding out from
Their small warm holes, tongues sniffing the dark.

In some unseen tree, a bird opens up
Its artery of song, soundtrack to the season.

Spring's on a binge, wild and primitive
As cousins from a land of hills and hollers

And hog lard for the elderberry pie.
Juiced with sap, the new air pours

Over me like sour mash on cracked ice.
I sip and sigh and settle in.

Illustration by Blair Thornley

We Can Do This: A Clean Energy and Climate Bill

Frances Beinecke — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

When President Obama urged the Senate to pass comprehensive clean energy and climate legislation in his State of the Union Address, one thing really caught the attention of Capitol Hill staffers: it was the only instance in which the president vowed personally to help Congress achieve a specific goal. "I am grateful to the House for passing such a bill last year," he said. "And this year I'm eager to help advance the bipartisan effort in the Senate."

The president's personal commitment matters. In Copenhagen, as climate negotiations neared collapse, he arrived on the scene and immediately rolled up his sleeves. When China sent a lower-level official to a key meeting, Obama himself tracked down Premier Wen Jiabao. At one point during the fragile talks, the president took out his pen and started drafting new text. In the end, he helped persuade the roughly 30 nations responsible for 90 percent of the world's carbon emissions to sign on to the Copenhagen Accord, an agreement that has already prompted China, India, Brazil, and other major polluters to report their efforts to address climate change in a transparent, international registry.

Clearly, President Obama is ready to get to work. Now the rest of us must do the same: we need to help build bipartisan support for a comprehensive approach to clean energy and climate legislation.

After Senate Democrats lost their filibuster-proof 60 votes in January, some political analysts said the climate bill was dead. Those forecasts were misguided. We have always known that climate legislation needs bipartisan support to succeed. Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, Democratic Senator John Kerry, and Senator Joe Lieberman, an independent, have proposed a policy framework for building such support. Actually securing those votes will be a tough fight: our senators need to know that Americans from all walks of life believe that creating clean energy jobs and fighting global warming are top priorities.

Clean energy and climate legislation will not succeed without you. Last December, President Obama summoned me and a group of other environmental leaders and business executives to the White House. The president told us that climate solutions were a top priority for him, but added, "I can't do this alone. I can't do it unless you help me build the case for action."

So I'm passing on the word: help us build the case for action. Tell your senators that you support clean energy and climate legislation.

Friends of a Feather

Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

It's shaping up to be a good year for bird aficionados. Those who already know and love all things bird should check out welovebirds.org, a blog and social networking site created by the Natural Resources Defense Council. There you can mix with other birders and share stories, photos, and videos. You can also sign up for action alerts to help protect your favorite feathered friends.

If you're looking to sharpen your bird-identifying skills, try the Audubon Society's new iPhone application. Available at audubonguides.com, it allows you to search by location, shape, or other characteristics so you can match what you observe in the field with an actual species.

Lives of the Trees

Laura Wright — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

One of my earliest child-hood memories is of the Helderberg Workshop, a summer camp I attended in rural Voorheesville, New York, when I was about 5 years old. My recollections are mostly fuzzy images of musty tepees and damp woodlands, but I also learned some vital life lessons: "Three Blind Mice" is the best song to play on the recorder, boys with a fondness for spearing millipedes with sticks are to be avoided, and birch bark makes for excellent drawing paper.

These memories returned while I was reading a delightful four-page chapter on the birch tree in Diana Wells's Lives of the Trees. It is just one of many dozens in the book, all of about the same length and organized alphabetically, each exploring the history of man's relationship with a different tree.

Birch trees immediately come across as far more useful than any of the trees starting with the letter A, as well as the early Bs. Their nuts are edible, their sap can be made into beer, and their bark is good not only for writing and drawing (Jefferson once suggested that field notes were better taken on weatherproof birch bark than on paper) but also for making clothing, canoes, and huts. In the event of a nuclear winter, birch would be a handy tree to have around.

Wells invites this sort of mental meandering, as she advances neither a single story line nor a focused argument. Instead, she leads the reader on an amiable tour of individual trees and their contributions to human civilization: spices, quinine, tea, coffee. Wells's review of coffee's history offers surprising details, including a note that the French novelist Honoré de Balzac is said to have drunk 60 cups a night. Only then, he claimed, would his ideas come "marching into his mind 'like battalions.' "

Another compelling chapter, on the cinchona tree, includes an unexpected primer on the origin of the gin and tonic. The key ingredient in tonic water is quinine, the first antimalaria drug, which is derived from cinchona bark. The curative powers of the bark were known to Europeans by the middle of the seventeenth century, after a Spanish countess was given it in powdered form while suffering from malaria during a trip to South America, where the tree is native.

After 1820, when two French scientists isolated quinine from the bark, the natural remedy began to change the course of history. Seeds were clandestinely ferried out of Bolivia and sold to the Dutch, who established a cinchona monopoly in Java, thereby cementing their dominance in the trade of various valuable tree products, including cinnamon from Sri Lanka and cloves from the Spice Islands. But the Brits best used it to their advantage. "Once quinine was available and relatively cheap," Wells writes, "Europeans could live in places that had previously been 'the white man's grave.' They could also dose their workers and exploit places that had been inaccessible....Who knows how history would have differed without quinine, dutifully drunk each evening in tonic (mixed with gin) as the sun set around the world."

Not all chapters of Lives of the Trees are created equal. Wells's history is more encyclopedic than narrative, and her prose is more languid than lyrical, which makes some chapters a bit of a slog -- namely, those that focus too heavily on the derivation of a particular tree's name. In the end, what makes the book special isn't of Wells's making at all. The true delight comes not from the party trivia you'll amass but from the memories, etched in the mind's own birch bark, that a small detail will bring suddenly back into view -- another reminder of how trees shape who we are without our really thinking about it.

Canada's Toxic Mess

Naomi Lubick — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Tar sands production in Alberta, Canada, has shot up considerably in recent years, from 482,000 barrels a day in 1995 to 1.3 million barrels a day in 2008, destroying bird habitat and leaving barren landscapes along the way. Some 205 square miles have been cleared or disturbed by mining operations, and tailing ponds cover more than 50 square miles.

Pollution from tar sands development is monitored by an industry-and-government collaborative known as the Regional Aquatic Monitoring Program, or RAMP, which tests the Athabasca River and other waterways for the presence of toxic chemicals contained in bitumen -- the semisolid form of oil that is extracted from the sands. OnEarth first reported on the effects of tar-sands mining in 2007 ("Canada's Highway to Hell," by Andrew Nikiforuk), and in December, a group of researchers led by David Schindler of the University of Alberta published a study that found RAMP's estimates to be much too low. The molecules they detected indicate that some of the pollution clearly came from refineries, not from natural seeps.

"The concentrations we found in the river are within the range known to be toxic to fish embryos," Schindler says.

NRDC: Behind the Wheel

George Black — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

A mechanical engineer by training, Roland Hwang is NRDC's transportation program director. He works on transportation, energy, and climate issues at both the state and federal levels.

Last year President Obama announced a national program to cut auto emissions. How does this relate to the administration's overall climate policy?

There are two critical aspects to the program. First, it will be an important step toward the pollution reductions needed to avert dangerous levels of global warming. Second, it demonstrates that what seems at first politically impossible-in this case, getting agreement among regulators, automakers, and environmentalists-can actually be achieved if all parties work productively and in good faith toward a solution. So we see the program as helping to pave the way for an agreement on an economy-wide cap on carbon.

You have been a long standing critic of the Detroit automakers for being overly dependent on gas guzzlers. Is that fair given the large profit margins they were making on SUVs and the fact that nobody could predict that oil prices would hit $140 a barrel?

In 1995, just as oil prices were starting to rise, I co-wrote a report called In the Tank: How Oil Prices Threaten Automakers' Profits and Jobs, which showed that Detroit Big Three profits would take the brunt of higher oil prices if they continued to ignore the risks of a potential for oil price shocks. Unfortunately, the reaction of the Detroit automakers was to dismiss our warning as alarmist, especially since it threatened their business model. I didn't have any special information or insight into the world oil markets that was unavailable to Detroit. Perhaps not surprisingly their economists ignored what was becoming increasingly plain to oil experts, but it was a message that the Detroit executives simply did not want to hear. We met with their economists face to face and they were, literally, in a state of denial.

The automakers have been claiming for years that requirements for cleaner, more fuel-efficient cars would hurt their industry. With higher fuel prices and rising demand for fuel- efficient vehicles, have they changed their perspective?

It's almost certainly true that their marketing departments "get it." When you see Howie Long extolling the fuel economy of full-size GM pickups during the Superbowl, you know that something is different. However, the question the OnEarth article raises is whether this short-term change in advertising heart will actually result in a long-term transformation of their corporate "DNA." If gasoline prices dropped overnight to $1 or $2 a gallon, some companies would gladly go back to selling gas guzzlers. In fact, this is exactly what happened during the 1990s when-it's hard to believe-oil actually dropped to $10 a barrel and gasoline was $1 or so a gallon. All the lessons of the first two oil shocks during the 1970s were lost, not just on Detroit but also on other companies like Nissan and Toyota, in a short-sighted rush to cash in on what seemed like an endless appetite for bigger, more gas-guzzling vehicles.

Wow, that seems like a scary (if realistic) prospect. How do we avoid history repeating itself?

Unfortunately, unless we take the right actions, we will continue to cede control of our economic and environmental destiny to foreign, oil-exporting countries, concentrated in the most politically volatile region of the world. Ironically for Detroit after years of fighting standards, what they most need is regulatory certainty and a clear, long-term signal that fuel economy and CO2 standards will be gradually and continuously strengthened over time. Without such certainty, the temptation is too great. Stronger, longer term standards actually act as an industry-wide "hedge" against oil price volatility and by requiring the entire industry to engage in the same strategy, you eliminate the risk that one automaker may face if it embarked alone on a higher fuel economy strategy. This is the unfortunate pressure that Honda was under since at $10 or $25 a barrel oil, it pays to do the wrong thing, at least in the short term. And of course, stronger standards reduce global warming pollution, enhance energy security, and create thousands of clean energy jobs.

So was it a good investment of our tax dollars to bailout GM and Chrysler?

Quite frankly, I'm not sure if we had much of a choice given the state of the economy. But it's clear that the auto industry globally is facing unprecedented structural pressures-global overcapacity, a decline in cheap financing, and continued pressure on fuel economy and CO2 standards. The old business model doesn't work; automakers have to find a way to become leaner and profitable selling clean cars, both smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles and advanced technology vehicles such as plug-in hybrids. Companies like Honda have a head start. The Chinese are trying to leapfrog the existing industry by going directly to electric cars. I was just in Beijing last year. The progress they are making is scary. GM and Chrysler must remake themselves or die. I'm cautiously optimistic they can make this transition, but it's a tough road.

Finally, not everyone can afford to drive a hybrid. What recommendations would you give to our readers?

I get that question a lot. For some people, the current hybrid offerings don't fit their budget or what they think they need. My advice is always first and foremost, "right size" your vehicle. That is, don't buy one that's bigger than you need for 95 percent of the time and don't take the fuel economy hit of a 4-wheel-drive vehicle if you only use it on rare occasions. Rent a minivan or a 4-wheel-drive vehicle for those occasional trips. And I never thought I would be saying this, but for some folks, a new "clean" diesel offered by many of the German manufacturers might be a very good choice. My personal vehicle is a conventional Honda Civic and we have two boys. The most environmental thing I do on a daily basis is to leave it parked in my driveway while I take the bus across the bay to San Francisco.

Ohio Decides Coal Is a Bad Deal

Lindsey Konkel — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

On September 17, 2007, Andrew Wetzler walked into city hall in Oberlin, Ohio, to attend a meeting of the city council, fact sheets and presentation materials in hand. Earlier that year, Wetzler, an NRDC attorney, and other staff members from the newly formed Midwest office had fanned out to attend council meetings in nearly a dozen cities and towns across the state -- from Oberlin to Westerville to Yellow Springs -- to oppose the building of a new coal plant in Meigs County, in southeastern Ohio. The 960-megawatt coal-fired plant, proposed by American Municipal Power (AMP), would emit seven million tons of carbon dioxide each year. It would also pollute the air and water by releasing particulate matter, which can contribute to asthma and other respiratory problems, and sulfur dioxide, which can lead to acid rain.

"It was a bad deal -- environmentally and economically," says Shannon Fisk, an attorney in the Midwest office.

AMP, an energy cooperative owned by its members -- in this case, cities and towns across Ohio and neighboring states -- wanted to finance the construction of the plant by locking member municipalities into long-term "take or pay" contracts. These contracts would require members not only to foot the bill for construction but also to commit to paying for the electricity the plant generated -- no matter the cost. AMP assured its members that the plant would be relatively cheap to build and operate and provide an affordable source of electricity. But in reality, projected construction costs were rapidly rising and the expected operating costs were increasing significantly as well, thanks to the prospect of federal climate change legislation and new coal ash disposal rules, and a hike in the cost of coal.

At the city council meetings, NRDC staffers made the case that the economics of building a new coal plant didn't make as much sense in the long term as other available alternatives, such as wind and solar. Initially it looked like a losing battle, as city after city signed up with AMP despite NRDC's advocacy efforts. "We knew we were up for a challenge in the heart of coal country," Fisk says.

But in the fall of 2009, as AMP was preparing to break ground, its contractors estimated that construction of the new plant would be more than 167 percent higher than the initial projection in 2005, rising from $1.5 billion to nearly $4 billion. At a committee meeting in November 2009, AMP's Ohio members decided to cancel the plant.

Fisk believes that NRDC's efforts laid the groundwork for community leaders to recognize a bad deal when they saw one. "Our message all along was that the plant would cost too much and that there were better alternatives," he says. "We were really the first ones to make this argument in Ohio."

AMP's plan for a new coal-fired power plant was one of 150 such proposals made during the Bush administration. As of today, 110 of them have been canceled. "People are realizing that the economic future of energy is in efficiency and renewables, not dirty nineteenth-century coal," says Fisk. NRDC is currently challenging another new coal-fired plant proposal in Ohio.

Wetzler, who was living in Columbus in 2007, believes that having a presence in the Midwest helped NRDC achieve its goals. "I think we would have received a far chillier reception if we had flown in from Los Angeles or New York and tried telling these folks what to do," he says.

The decision to cancel the plant could ultimately prove a boon to AMP's Ohio members on several fronts. "There's a great opportunity to make better choices here," says Thom Cmar, an NRDC staff attorney in Chicago. The plant was supposed to reduce members' reliance on electricity from the wholesale market. But "saving energy through energy-efficiency programs is by far the cheapest option," says Dylan Sullivan, an NRDC energy advocate in Chicago. Ohioans will not only save money by not building the plant; they will also have one less source of pollution and carbon emissions fouling their air and water.

"This is one more small step toward a sustainable energy future," says Cmar. "If it wasn't for our willingness to really jump in and fight this thing on the ground, it wouldn't have happened."

Fisk believes that the decision to cancel the new plant sends a message far beyond Ohio. "It's one thing when a state like California decides not to build a coal plant," he says. "But when a state in the heart of coal country decides not to do it -- that's a pretty strong statement."

Driven

Craig Canine — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

The scene was straight out of a Sheryl Crow song. I was standing on Santa Monica Boulevard across from a giant car wash, looking for some fun, the Los Angeles sun beating down, when a gorgeous, garnet-red car pulled up. The driver offered me a lift, so I hopped in and we drove off. I felt a little thrill. The ride was so quiet and smooth, the car's interior so roomy and luxurious. It was my virgin excursion in a car powered by hydrogen.

The car was a Honda FCX Clarity and its driver was Terry Tamminen, former head of the California Environmental Protection Agency and chief policy adviser to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. Tamminen left state politics in 2007 to start a nonprofit consulting firm that works on sustainability issues. He is one of about a dozen people in the Los Angeles area who have so far been chosen by Honda to lease one of its sleek, aerodynamically sculpted Clarity sedans. As we drove around, I was struck by the generous legroom in the front passenger seat -- one of several pleasing side effects of the lack of an internal combustion engine under the hood. Another was the absence of engine noise as Tamminen accelerated. Instead I heard the softly rising hum of an electric motor, a sound that reminded me of riding in an elevator.

"My wife drives a natural gas–fueled car," he told me as we cruised. "It's also a Honda, their Civic GX, which has the world's cleanest internal combustion engine. I'd happily lease a hydrogen car from another vendor, but Honda's is the first fuel-cell vehicle that's certified by the government to market to ordinary consumers."

This is only one of the many firsts that Honda has compiled in a long history of introducing progressively cleaner, less polluting products to the American automobile market. In 1975 Honda became the first automaker to introduce an engine -- the CVCC, powering the Civic -- that met the Clean Air Act's standards by combusting fuel more completely and cleanly inside the engine, rather than taking the comparatively inelegant Detroit approach of "scrubbing" pollutants out of post-combustion exhaust gases using a costly device called a catalytic converter. Honda was also the first in its industry to meet a series of increasingly stringent emission standards set by the California Air Resources Board (CARB). Honda's 1984 CRX-HF was the first mass-produced car to get more than 50 miles per gallon. The company has consistently ranked number one (occasionally slipping to second place, behind Toyota, and now vying for first with Hyundai) as the automaker with the highest Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) ranking. Perhaps most telling, in 2005 Honda broke ranks with the rest of the auto industry to voice support for stronger federal fuel efficiency standards and to embrace the challenge of meeting aggressive greenhouse gas reduction goals.

This record has earned Honda something of a green halo. It has, in fact, been singled out as the most environmentally responsible automaker by a spectrum of advocacy groups, academic researchers, and industry analysts. "Honda is number one when it comes to the environment," says Daniel Sperling, head of the Institute of Transportation Studies at the University of California, Davis, and current appointee to CARB's automotive engineering seat. "However you look at it, whether in terms of corporate philosophy, product mix, or the technology in any particular vehicle, Honda generally ranks at the top."

Honda's green streak extends to that other kind of green, as reflected on its balance sheet. Although its sales have plunged along with those of its competitors in the past couple of years, Honda has maintained a healthy ratio of cash to debt while General Motors and Chrysler, drowning in red ink, groveled for (and received) huge cash infusions from the government, emerging from bankruptcy as shadows of their former selves. How much, I wondered, has Honda's past record of environmental leadership contributed to its current, relatively healthy financial position? What inspired the company's green streak in the first place, and how deep is it? And to what extent (if any) are the fallen titans of Detroit looking to Honda as a model to emulate as they cast about for survival strategies? I traveled to Honda's American headquarters in Torrance, California, in search of answers.

The American Honda Motor Company occupies a neatly landscaped 110-acre campus in Torrance, about 20 miles south of downtown Los Angeles. My first appointment was with Ben Knight, vice president of research and development. Tall and soft-spoken, with thinning light-colored hair and gray-blue eyes, Knight is a 33-year veteran of the company, which he joined soon after receiving degrees in mechanical engineering and business administration from Stanford University. "Honda is a company that cares about the customer and society, and it's very difficult to provide value to both," he said. "That's the challenge."

Rummaging through a folder of papers, he pulled out a printed PowerPoint graphic. "This is what we call the Three Hill slide," he said. The "three hills" were a trio of rising curves on a graph that plotted society's increasing environmental concerns over time. The first of these curves, in black, depicted growing alarm, starting in the mid-twentieth century, over worsening air quality. The second, an ascending red line, was labeled "Climate Change." The third hill, a green line sloping up above the red one, represented Americans' burgeoning interest in energy sustainability. Each of these hills, Knight told me, was the focus of a distinct set of goals that have guided Honda research and product strategy from the 1970s to the present and will set its priorities for the future.

"We created this as a kind of R&D road map back when air quality was the biggest concern on the public's mind, and the only concern of the regulatory agencies," he said. "But we saw climate change coming as a growing societal concern, and then, arising from that, the desire to move away from petroleum to alternative fuels, to vehicles and infrastructure that would address long-term energy sustainability."

In its efforts to conquer the first hill -- slashing emissions of the six so-called criteria pollutants that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) regulates under the Clean Air Act: nitrogen oxides (NOx), sulfur oxides (SOx), carbon monoxide, lead, particulate matter, and ground-level ozone -- Honda pushed the internal combustion engine to new heights of fuel economy and cleaner emissions. Knight reeled off a series of Civic models that set industry-leading precedents: the CRX-HF in the mid-1980s, the Civic VX in the early '90s, and the Civic HX in the later '90s. These models were never best sellers, but "all of them are successes in Honda's mind," Knight told me, "because there was a lot of learning going on in combustion technology, transmission technology, aerodynamics, and customer acceptability." This learning could be applied to the rest of Honda's product lineup.

Knight was especially proud of research in the 1990s that culminated in the four-cylinder 2000 Accord sold in California. "Our goal was to take emissions of the gasoline internal combustion engine to near zero, and we achieved it with this car -- not just in a lab but in real-world driving conditions," he said. In collaboration with the College of Engineering-Center for Environmental Research at the University of California, Riverside, Honda fitted a 2000 Accord sedan with air-testing equipment, then drove the car around the Los Angeles area. The onboard analyzer measured levels of pollutants in the air coming into the engine through its air intake and the air going out through the exhaust pipe. Knight pointed to a series of graphs on a PowerPoint slide showing that the car's exhaust contained lower levels of NOx and hydrocarbons than the intake air. The car was, in effect, filtering pollutants out of the air. This was the first gasoline-powered car to meet California's Super-Ultra-Low-Emission Vehicle (SULEV) tailpipe standard, which meant it was about 90 percent cleaner than a typical gasoline-fueled car. "This is a fantastic story," Knight said, beaming.

What motivated Honda to make these innovations while Detroit did all it could to thwart tougher regulations and higher fuel efficiency standards? According to Knight and other corporate insiders, it all goes back to the company's founder, Soichiro Honda.

Born in 1906, the first son of a blacksmith and a weaver, Honda was good with his hands and mechanically inclined. By the age of 21, he was in charge of a branch office of an auto-repair business. In 1946 he took a small military-surplus engine and fitted it to a bicycle, using a hot-water bottle as the fuel tank. Honda's motorized bicycles proved popular in postwar Japan as an inexpensive way to get to and from work. Good fuel economy was an essential feature, because Japan had no oil reserves of its own; gasoline was a precious (and pricey) imported commodity.

Honda established its first beachhead for exports in 1959 with a small storefront in Los Angeles, which initially focused on motorcycles. At the time, these had a bad-boy image in the United States. But Honda effectively countered this marketing challenge with its "You meet the nicest people on a Honda" ads, starting in the early 1960s, coupled with its 49cc Super Cub, a peppy little motorbike that projected an image more Petula Clark than James Dean.

In 1970 Honda put out feelers by exporting small numbers of its first automobile, the N600 sedan, to the U.S. mainland (it had earlier sold a few in Hawaii). Smaller and almost 600 pounds lighter than a Volkswagen Beetle, the car was inexpensive both to buy and to operate. Enough N600s sold to suggest that there was an opening for such a car in the American market. It made sense: public concern about pollution was on the rise, prompting Congress to establish the EPA in 1970 to set new regulatory standards. American automakers were busily adding chrome, tail fins, and more powerful V-8 engines to their cars, all but ignoring safety and pollution issues. Honda directed some of its best engineers, previously assigned to the company's successful racing division, to produce a cleaner, more efficient internal combustion engine. The result of this initiative, which Honda called CVCC (for Compound Vortex Controlled Combustion), changed the fluid dynamics in each cylinder in a way that caused more complete combustion of fuel. This had the double advantage of reducing dirty tailpipe emissions and boosting fuel economy. Honda began putting its groundbreaking engine into a more refined successor of the N600, called the Civic, in 1974 -- just when Americans were reeling from the effects of the Arab oil embargo.

"There was a huge positive response, both from regulators and from the market," said Robert Bienenfeld, senior manager of environment and energy strategy at American Honda. "I think Honda woke up to the idea that not only was this environmentally friendly technology good for society, but it was good for business. And until June of 2009, every CEO that the company had came out of the small engineering team that worked on the CVCC. They all carried with them this lesson they learned early in their careers, that ‘clean' could sell cars."

Honda's response to the 1975 emissions standards mandated by the 1970 Clean Air Act contrasted starkly with that of the Big Three U.S. automakers. The prevailing view in Detroit at the time was that the only way to reduce toxic engine emissions was by adding catalytic converters -- that is, treating dirty exhaust gases after they had been created in a car's engine. But catalytic converters had several drawbacks. First, they were expensive. Second, early catalytic converters were fragile and finicky and often made vehicles perform more sluggishly. Third, they required unleaded fuel, but "regular" gas still contained lead in the mid-1970s as an additive to reduce engine knock.

Rather than going back to the drawing board, Detroit lobbied, litigated, and lamented, beginning a pattern of reflexive opposition to environmental standards that lasted for 40 years. Ironically, after scoffing at Honda's CVCC engine when it first appeared in the 1975 Civic, each of the Detroit manufacturers wound up licensing the technology.

Honda's success in meeting the provisions of the Clean Air Act through revolutionary improvements in engine technology put the company on a defining course -- one that set it distinctly apart from the Detroit Three. "That core experience became part of the company's culture and DNA," Bienenfeld said.

Today Honda claims an 11 percent share of the U.S. automobile market, well behind its chief Japanese rival, Toyota, which has a 17 percent market share. But as an industry bellwether in developing ever-cleaner and more efficient cars, Honda has always had a disproportionally large influence in Detroit. "In many areas, we take Honda more seriously than Toyota," GM vice chairman Bob Lutz told the Detroit News in 2007, "especially when it comes to engine technology... Honda doesn't have the scale of Toyota, but they're also on a very fast track" to growth.

At Honda Robert Bienenfeld's job is to work with agencies such as the EPA and CARB to plan the company's strategy for adapting to the changing regulatory landscape over the next several decades. He is, in other words, the company's top futurist. "California set a goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2050," he said. "That number is extraordinarily challenging. It means that on a per-vehicle basis, we'll have to cut CO2 emissions by 90 percent. And that's not just from the tailpipe; it includes all the upstream emissions as well."

"Upstream" refers to everything that has to happen to get a fuel from its source to the vehicle that will use it, or from "well to tank." In the case of gasoline, upstream emissions include any carbon released while pumping crude oil out of the ground, refining the oil, and transporting finished fuel to a filling station. "In the really, really clean future of 2050," Bienenfeld said, "the thinking is that liquid fuels -- probably low-carbon biofuels of some kind -- might have to be reserved for aviation, marine shipping, and heavy-duty trucking. In that case, light-duty vehicles won't be able to burn anything. The upstream carbon emissions alone of gasoline would exceed the CO2 levels we're talking about. So even a plug-in hybrid vehicle, at that point, wouldn't work, because it has an engine that burns something. You'd need a battery electric vehicle or a fuel cell."

To encourage others at Honda to think about what the future may bring, Bienenfeld started a reading group. "We're reading classics of environmental literature," he told me, including Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, John McPhee's Encounters With the Archdruid, Malthus on population growth, and A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. The goal is to understand the insights of past environmental thinkers and ponder what lessons they might teach about the future. It's hard to imagine such a group convening in the halls of, say, Chrysler's headquarters in suburban Detroit. Changing a corporate culture obviously involves more than reading groups, but it's tempting to wonder whether the Big Three would have come as close to financial collapse as they did last year if they had nourished this kind of deep thinking.

The crucial turning point on Detroit's road to near-ruin came when sport utility vehicles started to dominate the new-vehicle marketplace. The roots of the SUV phenomenon went back to 1975, when Congress passed the law establishing fuel economy standards but left a loophole that set less stringent standards for light trucks (which, at the time, were mostly commercial vehicles, including pickups). Americans developed an appetite for larger vehicles in the mid-1980s thanks to historically low gas prices, which came on top of an economic recovery and growing disaffection for the shoddy smaller cars Detroit was desperately pumping out to comply with CAFE standards. Families began to discover vehicles, like the Jeep Cherokee, that were classified as light trucks but felt more like plushly appointed cars or station wagons. Detroit exploited the light-truck loophole for all it was worth, returning to profitability as baby boomers snapped up ever-bigger SUVs, which were inexpensive to make relative to the high prices they could command.

Honda was not completely immune from the upsizing trend, adding a few larger vehicles to its lineup rather late in the game. These products, however, represented an extremely measured, modest concession to the enormous pressure that Honda management was feeling from stockholders, the automotive press, and its own dealers to develop more big vehicles and brawny V-8 engines to go with them. Toyota, which had ambitions of dethroning GM as the world's largest automaker, adopted a product strategy that looked a lot like the U.S. automakers' enthusiasm for truck-based vehicles. But Honda held back, never offering a V-8 option.

This meant that it missed out on some of the fat profits its competitors made on their Expeditions, Tundras, and Escalades. In the long term, however, keeping its fundamental focus on efficient, small- to medium-size cars served it well. "Honda knew that an efficiency edge was important to their brand, and they stuck with that," says John DeCicco, a senior lecturer on transportation energy policy at the University of Michigan. "They may have forgone some profits during that period, but they maintained steady growth. So when market conditions changed, as they have recently, Honda was in the best position to weather the storm."

In the summer of 2008, when a big spike in gas prices coincided with growing signs of economic crisis, the most immediate emergency facing U.S. automakers (and Toyota) was coping with their sudden, huge overcapacity in manufacturing light trucks. They couldn't shut down factories quickly enough. Meanwhile, Honda's biggest problem was that, in spite of its storied manufacturing flexibility, it could not keep up with the demand for the Fit, a roomy subcompact rated at 34 mpg on the highway. The marketing tag line for the Fit was "Small is the new big." This ever-so-Honda slogan has become the new mantra in Detroit.

I timed my visit to Honda to coincide with last December's LA Auto Show, which I hoped would provide some colorful context at a redefining moment for the U.S. auto industry. I arrived just in time to catch a press conference at the Honda booth. Dave Marek, director of advanced design at Honda R&D Americas, stood by while a veil was whisked from one of the latest conceptual studies from his studio. It was the shell (without working parts) of the P-NUT, short for Personal-Neo Urban Transport, and it resembled a terrestrial version of a Jedi starfighter -- a minicar shaped like a truncated airfoil topped with a swept-back cowling of smoked glass.

Marek is a rock star among car designers. With his amber glasses, pointy-toed, lizard-skin boots, and unique hairstyle (nothing on top, a military shave on the sides, and wispy trails in back), he looks like Bono with a mullet. The three-seater P-NUT, he explained, was Honda's vision of "a vehicle conceived exclusively around the city lifestyle." Yet Honda was not explicitly touting this design exercise as a "green car." That would have been so 2007. The implicit message was: "We know how to make ultraefficient cars; we've moved on now to make ultraefficiency both fun and stylish."

From the look of the surrounding booths, the rest of the industry was desperately trying to catch up. I couldn't count all the "green" and "eco" cars that vied for attention all over the Los Angeles Convention Center's dozen football fields' worth of exhibition space. All the major automakers except Chrysler had hybrids to tout, signaling the arrival of gas-electric dual power trains to the automotive mainstream (if not yet the mass market). The main event at Ford's booth was the unveiling of a North American version of the 2011 Fiesta -- an answer to Honda's Fit. (Ford's introduction, in January, of the 2012 Focus further reflected the company's shift toward smaller, highly efficient cars and "crossovers," which are nouveau, post-SUV station wagons.)

The real story of the show, however, was the number of manufacturers that unveiled plug-in electric hybrids, which run mainly on batteries that are recharged from an electric outlet and also have a small gasoline (or even diesel) engine that powers a generator to extend battery life and vehicle range. Ford had a plug-in version of its Escape hybrid available for test drives. GM's long-prophesied (and much-hyped) Volt was on prominent display, as well as a Volt-based concept, the Cadillac Converj. And Toyota showed off a plug-in Prius, expected to hit the market in 2011.

A growing drumbeat of opinion among industry watchers insists that plug-in hybrids are the inexorable next step in greening the vehicular landscape. Federal energy policy has also tilted the playing field in favor of plug-in hybrids and pure battery electric vehicles (BEVs). Yet Honda, historically a leader in so many other advanced fuel-saving technologies, has lagged conspicuously behind in this area. It has demurred in the rush toward battery power in a way that is reminiscent of its refusal to develop a V-8 engine a decade ago -- and for the same basic reason. The company's governing philosophy is "do more with less." Batteries, in their current state of development, require doing less with more: more cost, more weight, more hassle (with the frequent need for lengthy recharging), and more worries about limited range.

What's more, plug-in hybrids and BEVs may have low-to-zero tailpipe ("tank to wheel") emissions, but they are hardly carbon free, especially if the electricity stored in their batteries comes from a coal-fired power plant. Given the current national average mix of fuels used to generate electricity, Honda's Ben Knight told me, a BEV has about the same carbon footprint as one of today's gasoline-electric hybrids. Both generate the equivalent of about 250 grams of CO2 per mile, from well to wheel. So there's little point, Knight and his colleagues say, in jumping on the plug-in bandwagon until the electric grid gets a lot cleaner and/or batteries get a lot cheaper, lighter, and less prone to overheat. In the meantime, similar CO2 results can be achieved using existing hybrid technology.

The official line at Honda, repeated to me by Knight, Bienenfeld, and other company representatives, is that no single "silver bullet" technology is going to emerge triumphant in the battle to build tomorrow's sustainable cars. Imminent crops of plug-in hybrids and BEVs will jostle with the already robust stream of gas-electric hybrids that are entering the marketplace, with a few other technologies -- hydrogen- and natural gas–powered cars, for instance -- sprinkled into the mix. In its assault on climate change, Honda is investing in a portfolio of research projects in all these areas. Its skepticism about the near-term viability of plug-ins has not dampened a keen interest in batteries, which, after all, are essential components of gasoline-electric hybrids as well as fuel-cell vehicles. Honda's booth at the Tokyo Motor Show last October featured the EV-N Concept, a relentlessly cute, retro minicar powered by batteries charged by rooftop solar panels. Tucked inside the passenger door was a truly out-there product of Honda's research labs: the UX-3 personal mobility device, a Segway-like unicycle that balances itself.

Looking farther out, toward the "third hill" of energy sustainability, Honda has a hand in developing a number of alternative-fuel technologies. For several years it has collaborated with a research institute in Japan to develop an efficient process for making cellulosic ethanol using inedible parts of the rice plant. The company is also supporting research into strains of algae that produce a low-carbon biofuel. A subsidiary company, Honda Soltec, makes solar panels from thin-film photovoltaic cells; Honda has installed these panels not only on buildings and ships but also on a prototype refueling station.

Much more critical to the company's near-term success, however, is further advancing fuel efficiency with conventional hybrid technology. Here Honda has struggled, losing some of its green public relations sheen to Toyota and even to its closest American imitator, Ford. In 1999 Honda was the first car company to launch a hybrid in the U.S. market, the 2000 Insight. Never expected to set any sales records, the Insight was a proving ground for the technology that Honda then put into a hybrid version of the Civic, on the theory that more people would buy a hybrid if it came in a conventional package. But the distinctly unconventional-looking Prius, which Toyota first offered American buyers in 2000, proved this theory wrong. "The second-generation Prius came out [in 2003] at a time when there was rising awareness about climate change, the Iraq war had turned unpopular, and energy security was an issue," Robert Bienenfeld told me, a bit ruefully. "The Prius became iconic as a way of making a social statement. It was more powerful than a bumper sticker. Toyota has been riding that wave since."

Honda hoped to fire a salvo across Toyota's bow last year when it began selling the 2010 Insight hybrid in the United States, pricing it several thousand dollars below the Prius. But sales have fallen far short of Honda's projections. Against this somber backdrop, Ford's 2010 Fusion Hybrid and, before that, its hybrid Escape have won effusive media accolades. Honda hopes to catch a break with the CR-Z, a sexy hybrid sports coupe that is scheduled to hit showrooms this summer. A hybridized Fit is expected to follow soon.

The speed bumps in Honda's rollout of hybrids will eventually recede in the rearview mirror, if it keeps up its past success in overcoming obstacles. What could prove more challenging in the long run is making good on its substantial bet on hydrogen fuel-cell technology. The FCX Clarity, which I rode in with Terry Tamminen and, a day later, took for a test drive at Honda headquarters, is the most sophisticated and advanced hydrogen car yet produced by any automaker. Nearly all of the world's major car companies, including GM, Ford, Chrysler, and Toyota, have developed prototype fuel-cell vehicles. But some have announced that they are discontinuing their hydrogen programs to concentrate research efforts on plug-in electric vehicles; others have voiced alternately hot and cold attitudes toward the technology, depending on shifting levels of federal support for transportation fuel-cell research.

One of the strongest arguments against hydrogen is the lack of a distribution infrastructure. Honda and other members of the California Fuel Cell Partnership (comprising Chrysler, GM, Toyota, and other car makers as well as energy companies and government agencies) are trying to change that by opening at least 46 public hydrogen stations, starting with clusters in four Southern California communities. Tamminen refueled his FCX Clarity at one of the few retail hydrogen pumps now open, at a Shell station on Santa Monica Boulevard. Filling up the tank -- about the size of a trash can stowed behind the rear seats -- with enough fuel to give the car a range of 240 miles took less than five minutes.

The other big strike against fuel-cell cars is the inefficiency of using hydrogen as a fuel. Prying pure hydrogen away from other elements to which it binds itself, like the oxygen in H2O or the carbon in natural gas, requires energy and releases CO2. In Honda's vision of "the really, really clean future of 2050," that energy will come from renewable, carbon-free sources. On its Torrance campus, the company has created a prototype of a home refueling station that uses solar energy from Honda's own photovoltaic panels to produce hydrogen from water - an elegant solution that also addresses the infrastructure issue.

Many observers question whether Honda's big bet on hydrogen will pay off. Skeptics abound. One of them is Dan Becker, director of the Safe Climate Campaign, an advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. "I would be much more pessimistic about hydrogen," he says, "if Honda didn't think it might work. Maybe they've made a mistake. But I'd want to watch a bit longer before making a final conclusion, because they've been right so many times before."

No automaker is perfect. Honda may be the greenest of the bunch, but its record is not without blemish. For example, Honda joined a lawsuit against AB1493, California's groundbreaking 2002 law that set standards for tailpipe greenhouse gas emissions. I asked Edward Cohen, vice president of government and industry relations at American Honda, why it went along with the rest of the industry in opposing the law after proactively embracing previous emission standards. "We were not seeking to block greenhouse gas standards," Cohen said. "In fact, at the same time that suit was filed, we urged the federal government to set higher CAFE standards. The reason we participated in the lawsuit was that we truly believed that you can get more done with a national standard than with a single California standard."

While the lawsuit (which was ultimately defeated) was working its way through the courts, Honda and a few of its industry peers were taking part in behind-the-scenes talks with California regulators, environmental groups, and, eventually, members of the Obama administration to seek ways of building a bridge of consensus between California's greenhouse gas standards and some kind of positive action at the federal level. The effort ultimately succeeded beyond anyone's most optimistic expectations. On May 19, 2009, President Obama stood in the White House Rose Garden and announced new greenhouse gas and fuel economy standards for passenger vehicles. "I never seriously thought I'd live to witness a moment like this," says Roland Hwang, transportation program director at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "There were people from all the major automakers, the EPA, the Department of Transportation, the State of California, and several of us from the environmental community, all coming together in agreement on tougher standards for greenhouse gas emissions and fuel economy. I had to pinch myself."

Even as other car makers start to behave, outwardly at least, more like Honda, there is a difference at the company's core that still sets it apart from its American rivals, especially GM and the perhaps fatally damaged Chrysler. "Honda for its whole history has had CEOs that have come out of Honda R&D," says John Casesa, a leading Wall Street automotive analyst for many years who is now a principal in the Casesa Shapiro Group, a consulting and financial advisory firm. "The people who run the company are the people who have created these great products. Whereas in Detroit, the management has historically come from finance and accounting. Honda is an engineering-driven company, not marketing driven. It doesn't market as aggressively as its competitors -- the products speak for themselves. That's getting more difficult to do, because the market is now so competitive." In the future, the issue is not whether Honda continues to be the greenest automaker or continues to build its market share. What really matters is whether the industry as a whole adopts Honda's efficiency-driven DNA.

Honda has always liked a good race. The tougher its competition gets in this particular contest, the better off we'll all be.