OnEarth Magazine Articles

Death at High Altitude

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

How can a beetle kill a grizzly bear? By wiping out one of its most important food sources. In the northern Rockies, warming temperatures and an infestation of pine beetles are combining to destroy entire forests of whitebark pine. Feasting on the tree's large, nutritious seeds helps grizzly bears survive hibernation.

But as global warming brings milder temperatures, beetles are spreading to high peaks that were once hostile to them. Many of those peaks are too remote for regular visits, and satellite data has not provided sufficiently accurate information, so scientists studying the beetle infestation have come up with another solution: aerial surveys that help map the whitebark pine's destruction throughout the entire 20 million-acre Greater Yellowstone ecosystem.

I took a seat on one of those recent flights. Here's what I saw:

Polar Obsession

Lauren Markoe — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Polar Obsession: Compelling Images of Polar Wildlife from the Lens of National Geographic
The National Geographic Society, Washington, D.C.
Sept. 24, 2009 to Feb. 10, 2010

As a wildlife photographer, Paul Nicklen doesn't like using his telephoto lens. He prefers lying on his belly in the ice. "Then I know I am getting something good," he says.

That philosophy has led to close encounters with polar bears, elephant seals, walruses and narwhals. The results are captured in his new book Polar Obsession, featuring 150 startling images that document his 15 years as a photojournalist.

Sixty of those images are also on display as part of a free exhibition at the National Geographic Society in Washington, D.C., through Feb. 10.

Nicklen gets close to the animals of the Arctic and Antarctic -- so close that he has nearly lost his life several times. He has been attacked by an 8,000-pound elephant seal, sniffed by a polar bear and charged by grizzlies. The result of this daring proximity is an array of photographs that reveal intimate details of life at the poles.

During one underwater shoot, a leopard seal swam up to Nicklen, who had already been submerged in near-freezing water for an hour, and repeatedly pushed penguins toward his diver's mask, inviting him to join her meal. Nicklen came away with a shot (shown at right) taken almost inside her open jaw -- so close that you can pick out even the bumps on her tongue.

In some of his other photos, narwhals are seen caressing each other with their unicorn-like tusks. A polar bear is caught leaping from ice floe to ice floe, his breath a plume of white smoke.

Nicklen was raised among the Inuit of Baffin Island, in Canada's Arctic. He spent his childhood roaming the icy landscape and learning how to survive it -- perfect training for a career that requires relocating to the world's most unforgiving environments for weeks at a time.

The rush of life on the edge inspires him. The stories behind his adventures accompany the images collected in Polar Obsession, including one hair-raising account of a trip gone wrong, when his broken plane drifted out to sea on an ice floe. We learn how he managed to witness the rarely seen spectacle of polar bears mating. And we know just what he was thinking as that determined leopard seal continued to shove penguins in his face.

Polar Obsession manages to capture the intricate delicacy of these polar wonderlands, teeming with life that could well be snuffed out within the next 20 years. Nicklen provides what few others can: a first-hand account -- in pictures and words -- of how climate change has already ravaged the poles, and how quickly we stand to lose an entire ecology that we have only begun to discover.

Protecting Polar Bears

Lauren Markoe — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

With sea ice melting beneath its feet, the polar bear is among the earliest and most dramatic victims of global warming. Some scientists predict its extinction by the end of this century. Yet Andrew Wetzler, a Chicago-based wildlife attorney for NRDC, sees good news in recent U.S. proposals that would protect polar bears from hunting and safeguard their Alaskan habitat. He discussed these latest developments with OnEarth.

So, is there hope for the polar bear?

There is some good news. First, under the Endangered Species Act, the United States has proposed setting aside very large areas of essential polar bear habitat in Alaska to protect them from oil and gas drilling and other threats. The United States has also proposed tighter restrictions on international trade and trophy hunting -- both of which still go on at very high levels in Canada -- through the Convention on International Trade and Endangered Species. In and of themselves, these two things are not going to reverse course for the polar bear, but it's important to make whatever progress we can. Here you have this magnificent creature, evolved over hundreds of thousands of years, whose habitat is literally melting away before our eyes.

Would international protections eliminate all hunting of polar bears?

No, they wouldn't. Nor would we want it to. Subsistence hunting would still go on in both Canada and Alaska. NRDC supports subsistence hunting so long as it's sustainable. The problem is that the hunting rate in Canada is unsustainable, and we believe that it's largely driven by the commercial market. The other thing to keep in mind is that if you look at global warming models, the only place where polar bears are likely to exist at the end of the century is in the central archipelago of Canadian islands in the Arctic Sea. It's going to be the last refuge of polar bears.

Could polar bears adapt to an environment without ice?

Very few scientists believe that polar bears can survive without sea ice coverage; you don't find polar bear populations anywhere there isn't significant yearlong sea ice coverage. They need it for almost all of their essential life functions: to migrate, find mates, and in the case of some populations, to den and raise their cubs. But most importantly, they need it to find food. Eighty percent of the polar diet is seals, and those seals are dependent on ice. Without access to sea ice, polar bears can't eat. As sea ice disappears, they must travel greater distances and spend longer periods of time fasting. Slowly, they begin to die out from nutritional stress and starvation. Scientists have observed polar bears drowning in storms, showing signs of severe weight loss, starving to death, and even resorting to cannibalism. In some populations, biologists expect to see the polar bears grow so thin that they can no longer reproduce.

How many polar bears are there in the world?

About 20,000 to 25,000. We don't know, historically, what the populations were in the past. Polar bears reached a low of maybe 6,000 in the early 1960's because of widespread hunting, until a 1973 treaty among countries with polar bears -- Russia, the United States, Norway, Canada, and Denmark -- restricted or banned much of that hunting (although hunting is still unsustainably high in some places, particularly Canada). So the populations recovered. People who oppose additional protections say, "Oh, 30 years ago there were only 6,000, and now there are 20,000, so how can you say they're endangered?" But a lot of very prominent biologists have pointed out that it's an apples-to-oranges comparison. We might be shooting fewer of them, allowing the population to recover somewhat, but their habitat is still disappearing, which means they're still in very real trouble.

The protected zone for polar bears in Alaska that the Interior Department proposed looks relatively small on the map. Is it large enough to make a difference?

Actually, it's the largest critical habitat designation in history: more than 200,000 square miles. The onshore areas may appear relatively small, but if you think about the size of Alaska -- it is one-third the size of the lower 48 states combined -- it's not actually so small. The designated area includes most of the important polar bear denning habitats, and, more significantly, it encompasses offshore areas of sea ice, which polar bears need to survive.

How optimistic are you that these proposals will actually become law?

The critical habitat designation in Alaska will happen in some form. The final rule, which will come out in about a year, may be somewhat different from the proposed rule, but we're hopeful it will still be strong. It may well be subject to challenge by the oil industry or other groups, so we'll have to take that as it comes. The protection of the polar bear under the international convention is going to be a challenge, but we're hopeful. You have to get the majority of 173 countries to vote your way. The polar bear very clearly meets the treaty's criteria for "uplisting." But we can't yet know exactly how a vote of that many nations (in Doha in March) is going to go.

Most of us live far from the Arctic. Can we do anything to help protect polar bears and polar bear habitat?

First, support efforts to curb global warming. If we don't deal with that problem, then the polar bear and thousands of other species are going to vanish, and they're going to vanish in our lifetime. Second, for polar bears specifically, we must give them the help they need to weather the global warming crisis. That means supporting U.S. efforts for strong international protections against international trade and trophy hunting and by supporting strong habitat protections here in the United States.

Fighting for Precious Ground

Charles Wohlforth — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Dave Atcheson had what some might consider a dream job: writing for magazines about fishing in Alaska. But he set his career aside for fear that the best spot he had ever fished could be destroyed.

"The fishing up there is outrageously good," Atcheson said. "I don't think it's something people outside Alaska could even comprehend, how amazing it is.

"You can go to streams up there and catch native rainbow trout that are eight, nine, 10 pounds, just one after another. You can go places where you catch 20, 30 king salmon in an afternoon that weigh 20, 30 pounds each."

The watersheds between Bristol Bay and Cook Inlet, southwest of Anchorage, are home to the largest salmon runs in the world, supporting fisheries worth $300 million annually. The marshy land has never been cut by roads or power lines. The water remains pure, in lakes that pock green meadows like the spots on a trout's back.

It took the promise of enormous wealth for anyone to consider disturbing such a place. Underneath these ponds lies one of the world's largest discoveries of gold, copper and molybdenum (a metal with various industrial applications). The gold alone is theoretically worth more than $90 billion, and the copper could fulfill a fourth of U.S. consumption for 50 years.

A partnership of international companies wants to dig a mine here, called Pebble. If fully developed, it would narrowly miss being the largest on earth -- a giant hole in the ground that would industrialize the area on a massive scale.

For Dave Atcheson, avoiding that prospect was enough to quit writing. He began by volunteering for Alaska's Renewable Resource Coalition -- a group focused entirely on stopping Pebble Mine -- then began working there full time. He now leads a foundation associated with the coalition.

"That fishery is like the Grand Canyon, or the redwood forest," Atcheson said. "It's something we just can't take a chance with."

VAST IMPACT ON WILDLIFE

In Alaska, the battle over Pebble has raged for five years, although the developers remain a year away from saying exactly what they plan to do or applying for permits. They expect the approval process to take another three years after that.

Company officials, and some Alaskans who remain neutral on the project, say all the attention is premature. Supporters promise a mine engineered to avoid environmental harm, while opponents don't believe that's possible.

The issue has already spawned a major lawsuit, the biggest election initiative campaign in the state's history, ethics and campaign finance investigations, and controversial intervention by former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, who weighed in against the initiative just before the vote -- despite a law requiring official neutrality. (She was later judged to have appropriately exercised her right to free speech).

Now national environmental organizations are getting more involved. The Natural Resources Defense Council recently named Bristol Bay a BioGem and launched a campaign to preserve it, primarily by highlighting the dangers posed by Pebble Mine and providing feedback to federal oversight agencies. The National Wildlife Federation, Trout Unlimited, and others are working with the many local groups that have mobilized.

NRDC and other groups are concerned about the vast potential impact of Pebble on fish and wildlife -- from salmon to caribou to whales and seals. The mine would require an immense open pit, as well as intentionally caved-in tunnels, permanent storage of perhaps 9 billion tons of acidic and metallic waste, a 65-mile road cutting through virgin country and crossing numerous salmon streams, and pipelines, a power plant and a major new deepwater port on Cook Inlet.

That inlet is home to an endangered beluga whale population, which is what first drew NRDC's interest. But NRDC's Taryn Kiekow and her colleagues learned that every aspect of the area's ecosystem depends on salmon. And the salmon, in turn, depend on clean water.

Harbor seals living in the fresh water of 77-mile-long Iliamna Lake are one of only two such populations on earth, said Kiekow, an attorney in NRDC's marine mammal program. "They're incredibly unique. They eat the salmon. Their watershed is directly below the mine.

"If anything happens to the salmon, it's sayonara."

HEAVY METALS, SEEPING TOXINS

Water quality is the key. A complex of major rivers, smaller streams and innumerable lakes around Bristol Bay provide perfect habitat for all five species of Pacific salmon, including the largest runs of red and king salmon anywhere.

Subterranean plumbing feeds the egg-laying gravels, as water bubbles up through the rocks with oxygen and stable temperatures ideal for incubating salmon.

Salmon biologist Carol Ann Woody said the unknown details of the interlocking watersheds and aquifers could determine the spread of heavy metals and other toxins seeping from the mine, damaging salmon runs.

And that's even if Pebble's colossal waste storage ponds never break through their dams and cause a catastrophic spill.

Woody is nervous that the Pebble Partnership won't find or call attention to the watery connections. She's currently leading expeditions to study remote salmon streams in the area, cataloging where spawning occurs. Her work is funded by the Nature Conservancy. She said her exploration has already discovered more new spawning grounds -- and reported them to state officials for protection -- than Pebble's scientists have disclosed.

"The company that stands to make billions of dollars is in control of all the science that is being done," Woody said, "and from my perspective, that is a problem."

The situation is not unusual for a development project. When companies apply for state and federal environmental permits, they also pay for the required environmental studies -- not the government.

But supporters say Pebble has done an unusual amount of work even before applying. Jason Brune, of the pro-development Resource Development Council, said the company has set a new standard for resource businesses in the state. His group, which includes fishing interests, has not taken an official stand on Pebble. Brune says it is too early, because exact plans haven't been announced.

$100 MILLION ON STUDIES ALONE

The Pebble Partnership is owned by Northern Dynasty of Vancouver, Canada, and London-based Anglo American. Pebble is Northern Dynasty's only project, while Anglo American is a large multinational mining company.

The partnership's CEO, John Shively, says the companies have followed the rules -- and gone well beyond them.

Pebble has already spent more than $100 million on environmental studies alone. He said the firm's exploratory work has caused less impact than the permits allow. And the land where the company is working has long been designated for mining by the state of Alaska.

But opponents say that Alaska's permitting process for mineral exploration is better suited to a prospector with a pick and a gold pan than to a project that would transform a region.

Shively was commissioner of natural resources for Democratic Gov. Tony Knowles and is a former executive of an Alaska Native regional corporation. His management team is full of well-known Alaskans, many with strong Native links.

Among the projects Shively worked on in the past was the Red Dog Mine, developed 20 years ago near Kotzebue in northwest Alaska. Boasted to be the largest zinc mine in the world, it is a notable economic success story, employing Alaska Natives in an area where jobs previously were scarce or non-existent.

But metal-laden dust and water pollution from Red Dog have long concerned villagers in the region. In September, the mine's owner, Teck Alaska, agreed to pay the EPA a $120,000 fine for violating wastewater permits.

Pebble has mounted an unprecedented community outreach campaign to the Native people of the Bristol Bay region and hired local villagers for a variety of jobs supporting exploratory work, while spending some $260 million on the project.

"CARETAKERS OF OUR LAND"

Low salmon prices for commercial fishermen and other economic pressures have hit the region hard. Villages are losing population, and many are in danger of closing their schools because too few young people have stayed.

Shively says he took the job with Pebble last year as part of a career of trying to bring economic development to rural Alaska. He said some of the opposition to the mine, which appears to discount village economic concerns, strikes him as "the height of elitism; urban, white elitism."

Yet strong Alaska Native opposition has developed in the region, too. The cash economy relies entirely on fish -- whether caught by commercial nets or by tourists -- and for most families, subsistence hunting and fishing also put food on the table.

A survey showed more than 70 percent of villagers opposed to the mining project, said Bobby Andrews, a subsistence hunter and fisherman from Dillingham who is spokesman for Nanamta Aulukestai, a coalition representing eight Yup'ik village corporations.

In English, the name means "Caretakers of Our Land."

Andrews said his group has studied how mining affected indigenous people elsewhere. They traveled to Nevada and met with Paiute and Western Shoshone people who live with contaminated mining land, where cleanup attempts have failed. Those tribes once heard promises like the ones the Yup'ik are hearing now from the Pebble Partnership.

For Andrews and others like him, the risk is too great, even if, as Shively promises, the mine will be engineered to protect water quality.

Fish and wildlife and the purity of the natural environment provide a renewable economic and food resource for the Yup'ik people, as well as spiritual sustenance in an ancient culture based on the land.

"We have to try and protect what we have now in perpetuity," Andrews said. "We can't do it on our own. We need the support of everyone to fight."

Where Will California Get Its Water?

Jenny Marder — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

This month, California officially entered its fourth year of drought. Fields are dry, wildfires are flourishing, and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Bay Delta -- which supplies 25 million Californians with drinking water -- is on the verge of environmental collapse.

If history and long-range climate forecasts are any indication, the word "drought" may no longer hold much meaning for Californians. Getting by with less water could become a way of life.

"Archaeologically, California has had a history of droughts that lasted for decades," says Wendy Martin, statewide drought coordinator for the California Department of Water Resources. And global warming probably won't make things any better, a report from her agency says.

By 2050, scientists project that a quarter of the snowpack in the Sierra mountain ranges -- an important source of drinking water for cities and irrigation for farms -- will disappear. Although more rain might fall in some parts of the state, the tradeoff will be more severe floods, the department says. And other parts of California could see even more dry years.

Yet the state of 37 million people doesn't have to dry up and blow away. As the drought crisis grows, water management experts are tapping into a wellspring of ideas for reducing the state's water use and finding new sources that could meet future needs.

Here are just a few of the most promising ones:

Strategy 1: Capturing Stormwater

Consider this: On a dry day in Los Angeles, up to 100 million gallons of urban runoff snakes through the city's drainage system, collecting trash and other city waste before emptying into the ocean.

That urban runoff contains enough water to fill the Rose Bowl, and then some. During a storm, that runoff can swell a thousandfold -- a huge untapped resource. Through better management practices, that wasted water could be captured and cleaned to help fulfill the parched city's needs.

That's the idea behind a strategy called low-impact development, or LID. Using porous pavement, creating rain gardens and collecting water in large tanks or barrels can reduce urban runoff, provide fresh drinking water and help recharge groundwater supplies.

How much water can that really save? A lot, according to a report released last month by the Natural Resources Defense Council. The organization says that aggressive use of LID techniques in some of the state's most-populated areas could supply a year's worth of water to two-thirds of the city of Los Angeles.

"It's a huge amount of water," says Noah Garrison, an NRDC project attorney who contributed to the report. "It's enough for roughly 800,000 families annually."

Low-impact development could also save energy -- enough to power 102,000 single-family homes for a full year, the report found -- and thus help fight global warming. The energy required for water use nationwide, including collection, distribution, treatment and disposal, releases as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere as 10 million cars.

Strategy 2: Water-Efficient Farming

Agriculture consumes as much as 80 percent of California's water, according to estimates from the Oakland-based Pacific Institute. So more efficient farming methods -- such as replacing crops that need a lot of water, including rice, with crops that are less water intensive -- could provide major savings.

So could high-tech drip irrigation systems. They're commonly used by grape farmers, but could become much more widespread, says Robert Bea, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the University of California, Berkeley who has researched water management techniques.

Drip irrigation systems rely on monitors to regulate water as it drips slowly through holes punched into tubes, adjusting the flow based on how "thirsty" the crops are. That means crops only get what they need, which can add up to substantial savings, Bea says.

The Pacific Institute says that the state's water use could be reduced 17 percent through better agricultural practices. That could go a long way toward making up what's expected to be lost through climate change. The institute also recommends scheduling irrigation times for early morning or late at night to minimize evaporation.

Strategy 3: Grey Water at Home

Bea, the engineering professor, recently took on the task of "greening" his own home. A big part of that task was finding ways to save -- and reuse -- water.

He hired a plumber to install pipes that drain water from his kitchen sink and the laundry machine into cisterns. Bea and his wife can now use that captured water -- known as "grey water" -- to provide for their oleanders, roses and hydrangeas, and to flush their toilets. They also collect shower water in buckets, which they use for similar purposes.

"We do not waste a drop of dishwater, laundry water or shower water," Bea says. "It's kind of like a home version of a water purification supply system."

Collecting and reusing grey water in just one household has the potential save as much as 26,000 gallons of drinking water per year, according to the Department of Water and Energy in the Australian state of New South Wales -- where some of these techniques are being promoted to deal with that country's own water supply problems. That's more than 520 bathtubs worth of water from a single house.

Recycling freshwater hasn't become popular yet in California, says Martin, the state's drought coordinator. But in places such as Los Angeles or Modesto, where the drought has forced governments to restrict outdoor watering, it could supply a much-needed resource for home gardeners to keep their plants satisfied.

Strategy 4: Public Education

Ultimately, Martin says, Californians will need to incorporate water-saving habits into their day-to-day lives as the water supply continues to dwindle. That means washing dishes and clothes only when the washing machines are full; filling the bathtub to halfway or less; and shutting off the faucet when brushing your teeth.

But how do you convince people to make water conservation a way of life? Rita Schmidt Sudman, executive director of the Water Education Foundation, says you have to start young.

Eleven years ago, her daughter's school had a classroom with a leaky faucet. When Sudman visited the third-grade class to give the students a lesson on water conservation, the first thing she did was put a bucket in the sink. By the time she had finished her lesson, the bucket was full. "See," she says. "That's how water is wasted."

Years later, she ran into one of her daughter's classmates in the Denver airport. "I'll never forget that drip in the back of the room and that bucket," Sudman recalls the young woman saying. "I always conserve water now because of you and that bucket."

Those kinds of savings, small as they might seem, can add up. The California Water Conservation Council says a slow faucet leak that drips 60 times per minute releases enough water every month to fill nearly five bathtubs.

Teaching children to become stewards of water at a young age is essential to planning for future needs, Sudman says. "Before I had daughter, I would have said, work with policymakers, work with adults. But it is vital to work with kids. And, you know, 10 years goes by in a minute."

An Endangered Tree

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

Can a tree be an endangered species? Dr. Sylvia Fallon, a geneticist and evolutionary biologist with the Natural Resources Defense Council, says yes. NRDC recently asked the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to add the whitebark pine, a tree crucial to the habitat of many animals in the Rocky Mountains, to the federal endangered species list. Vast tracts of whitebark pine have already been destroyed by mountain pine beetles, fungus, and other threats driven by climate change. Fallon wrote the petition seeking endangered species protection for the whitebark pine and will learn early next year whether the Fish and Wildlife Service has decided to move forward, which means crafting a plan for protecting the tree. She talked to OnEarth about the threats confronting whitebark pine, why this species is so critical to the West, and what it takes to get federal protection for a plant. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Does the Endangered Species Act already protect plants?

Trees and plants are treated the same as any other species under the Endangered Species Act, and there are a number of them already listed. But there is a distinction between vertebrate organisms and other species: the act can protect individual populations of vertebrates, but for invertebrates and plants, the protections must apply to an entire species or subspecies. There are some trees on the endangered species list, but, so far, trees that are listed have very restricted environments -- they're found on a single island or in a few counties. The whitebark pine is the only wide-ranging tree ever proposed for inclusion on the endangered species list. It's found in the western United States, both along the coast and inland, throughout the Rocky Mountains, and on up into Canada.

How does the government decide if a species deserves endangered species status?

The definition of an endangered species under the law is any species in danger of extinction within the foreseeable future throughout all or a significant portion of its range. A threatened species is any species that is likely to become endangered. The Fish and Wildlife Service uses a series of factors to evaluate endangered species petitions based on a species' habitat and biology: modification of that habitat, diseases and predation, other natural or manmade factors affecting the species, and the inadequacy of existing regulatory mechanisms.

What are the main threats to whitebark pine?

There's recently been a major mountain pine beetle outbreak. In the past, the beetles didn't reach the high elevations where the whitebark pine is found; now elevated temperatures have moved their range higher up. And their life cycle is also accelerated -- they're able to reproduce more quickly and survive winters better than before. Another threat is an introduced fungus called blister rust. The trees are more susceptible to infection by the mountain pine beetles if they have already been weakened by blister rust.

Beetles also infest mature trees, and it's now common practice to manage forests by suppressing fires. The result is continuous, intact stands of older trees that the beetles can move through pretty easily.

There's definitely a synergy among these factors, but without climate change, we wouldn't have seen this large outbreak of pine beetles. Climate is really what's driving the devastation of the species.

What's the current status of the whitebark pine proposal?

We're still waiting for the Fish and Wildlife Service's initial 90-day finding, in which they'll decide whether to consider the whitebark pine's case for endangered species status. If the Fish and Wildlife Service decides the tree's situation merits further study, it triggers a 12-month internal review. During that time, they'll gather more data and assess the whitebark pine's threats in more detail. At the end of that process, the Fish and Wildlife Service decides whether they will protect the whitebark pine under the Endangered Species Act.

What happens if the whitebark pine is added to the endangered species list?

The Fish and Wildlife Service would devise a strategy to deal with the threats to the whitebark pine. Right now there are only limited efforts and research underway to deal with both the blister rust and the beetles, but this would require a concerted effort -- one that's enforceable by law. Our hope is to bring the added resources and attention to what this species needs to survive.

As with any species threatened by climate change, the single most important thing we can do is address global warming. But there are also a few things that can be done in the short term that might help stop the spread of the beetle and the fungus. One strategy might be to selectively cultivate trees that show natural resistance to the blister rust. There's also some research into using pheromones that trick beetles into thinking a tree is already infested, which makes them less likely to burrow into it. But there's no way to predict how long it will take to see any recovery.

The seeds of the whitebark pine are a major food source for grizzly bears. Recently, a federal court added grizzly bears back to the federal endangered species list. What does that mean for the whitebark petition, for grizzlies, and for the Rocky Mountain ecosystem as a whole?

The whitebark pine problem played a huge part in the recent court case. The judge's decision noted that the Fish and Wildlife Service failed to adequately consider the effect that declining whitebark pine would have on the grizzlies. Reinstating protections for the bears means that the service will need to address the added threat that the loss of whitebark pine poses to the bear. This may mean reconsidering the habitat necessary to support the bear, for example, and working to reduce conflicts with humans that threaten bears as they search for additional food sources.

We worked with the U.S. Forest Service on an innovative research project to map the whitebark pine die-offs throughout the entire Greater Yellowstone ecosystem. The news has not been encouraging for grizzly bears' future survival, as early data returns indicate that over 70 percent of whitebark pine trees have died in some areas. That's a problem for the bears ... and for the entire region, since whitebark pine is a foundational species that creates the conditions necessary for other plants and animals in the area.

Invasion of the Pine Beetles

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

From the air above Yellowstone National Park, the view has turned a sickly gray. Warmer temperatures have triggered a beetle infestation in the whitebark pine and other trees that make up the Yellowstone ecosystem. Jesse Logan, former head of beetle research at the U.S. Forest Service's Rocky Mountain Research Station, has studied the northern Rockies for more than 15 years and shares his thoughts about the current infestation, the importance of whitebark, and what Yellowstone could look like in the future. It might not be a pretty picture. (The interview has been edited for length and clarity.)

Pine beetle infestations are a common occurrence in the Rockies. How is the current outbreak in whitebark pine different?

Whitebark pine is restricted to high elevations in the Rocky Mountains. Forests of this tree form an important part of the ecosystem above 8,500 feet. In the past, the climate has just been too cold in the winter and not hot enough in the summer for pine beetles to be able to complete their yearly life cycle at that elevation. Pine beetle outbreaks have historically occurred in lower-elevation stands of lodgepole and ponderosa pines. The climate in the northern Rockies is changing -- milder winters and hotter summers have allowed the pine beetle to increase its range.

Why are pine beetles so devastating to whitebark pine?

One hypothesis is that the whitebark pine didn't evolve with the beetle like lower elevation lodgepole or ponderosa pines, leaving it more susceptible to infestation. The pine beetle has a symbiotic relationship with the blue stain fungus. This fungus, which clogs up the tree's resin ducts, combines with the feeding activity of the pine beetle and its larvae to kill the tree. Adult pine beetles make feeding tunnels through the tissue that carries nutrients throughout the tree. Then when the larvae hatch, they disrupt the tree's whole circulatory system.

Why are whitebark pine trees important to the Yellowstone ecosystem?

Whitebark pine plays an important role in the hydrologic cycle of the West. Because most of the water in the West accumulates as snow, it's important to have gradual run-off. If run-off happens too fast, water is lost. This has negative impacts on the water supply. It's important to maintain forest cover at whitebark pine elevations, because a healthy tree cover helps prolong the release of water in the spring by capturing snowfall like a fence. The whitebark also has a large, highly nutritious seed that's an important food source for a wide array of wildlife, including grizzly bears. Grizzlies depend on this seed to put on their winter weight -- there isn't a large berry or fruit crop for them to feed on in Yellowstone that time of year. The whitebark pine also keeps grizzlies in the high country, out of trouble. Without it, they're coming into contact and conflict with humans, raiding garbage cans and gut piles left by hunters.

When did the whitebark pine die-offs start?

When we started investigating the health of whitebark pines in 1994, our major study site was on Railroad Ridge, in central Idaho. In the 1930s, there had been a significant death of whitebark pine, presumably caused by a bark beetle infestation, associated with a warm period in that area. At that time, the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports had just come out, with early global warming predictions. Given what we knew from the previous die-off, we wanted to ask the question: If warming occurs in the amount the report says, what would this mean for the geographic distribution of the pine beetle? The first year that we saw significant mortality of whitebark pines on Railroad Ridge was 2003. It was a catastrophic thing. By 2006, most of the larger, comb-bearing whitebark pines were killed. We're seeing the same scenario repeated throughout greater Yellowstone. This year we completed an aerial inventory of the entire ecosystem -- we'll have concrete figures in a few months, but I'd hazard a guess that the pine beetle has infested 80 percent of the whitebark pines.

Can anything be done to save them?

This is a natural event on the scale of Katrina. Could you build a fan big enough to blow a hurricane back out to the ocean? The scale, the speed, is just too much. This is a global warming issue. Until we begin to address the reduction of greenhouse gasses, this is probably a catastrophe that's going to happen.

Last week, a court ruling put grizzly bears in Yellowstone back on the endangered species list. What does this mean for their predominant food source -- whitebark pine seeds?

The impacts of this are huge for the grizzly, but it's less clear what the impact will be for whitebarks. This may mean revising the areas that have been marked for grizzly protection. There's a real disconnect between the designation of grizzly recovery areas and where whitebark pines are being lost. But there are some places throughout greater Yellowstone where the whitebark pines are still relatively healthy. Designating these as recovery areas could keep the grizzlies fed and out of contact with people, which is good for the bears, because they always come out on the short end of these interactions.

What will the forests of the northern Rockies look like 30 years from now without the whitebark pine?

Neither I nor anyone else has a crystal ball. Other trees species could move in and colonize the habitat. Lodgepole pine, for instance, is great at recolonizing a disturbed habitat -- it made a huge comeback after the 1988 wildfires. But nothing -- not lodgepoles or limber pines or anything else -- is going to replace the unique ecosystem services provided by whitebark pines. Lodgepole pines have a more closed canopy, whereas whitebarks tend to fan out, creating cover for breeding elk and other animal species. Lodgepoles also lack the large, nutritious seeds of whitebark pines. These are really unique forests.

Resurrecting a River

Kiera Butler — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Deep in California's Central Valley, about 20 miles west of Fresno, a parched trough cuts through the tiny town of Kerman. Not much grows there -- just one or two scrubby bushes and a small stand of tobacco trees covered in dust.

A passerby would never guess that California's second-longest river, the San Joaquin, once flowed here. Its 330-mile journey provided clean water and abundant fishing from high in the Sierra Nevada mountains down to the fertile San Francisco Bay-Delta.

Retired farmer Walt Shubin has lived by the banks of the San Joaquin for nearly all of his 79 years. As a teenager in the 1930s, he watched the Chinook salmon run the river each spring.

"They made a noise like cattle, they were so big," Shubin recalls. "They left a wake like a motorboat."

The salmon died off after California's Bureau of Reclamation built the 319-foot Friant Dam in 1942, diverting most of the river's water into irrigation canals. More than 60 miles of the river -- including the Kerman trough -- have been dry ever since.

What is left of the river runs thick with chemical waste from farms.

But on Thursday, for the first time in more than 60 years, the Friant Dam will open, and freshwater will flow through the entire river once again.

RESHAPING THE LANDSCAPE

In 1988, the Natural Resources Defense Council, along with a coalition of environmental groups and commercial fishermen, sued the Bureau of Reclamation. NRDC and its allies said the bureau was violating California's Fish and Game Code, which requires dam owners to "keep in good condition" the fish below their dam.

After a drawn-out battle, the coalition won in 2004. In 2006, the parties reached a legal settlement designed to prepare the river for the return of the now-endangered Chinook salmon -- one of North America's largest freshwater fish -- which once swam from the Pacific Ocean to the river's upper reaches to spawn.

Fixing a river doesn't come cheap. The project will cost between $400 and $650 million in federal and state government funds.

Some of the area's 15,000 farmers, many of whom rely on water diverted above the dam, question the necessity of restoring fresh water to a region that has managed to live without it for more than half a century -- particularly given California's current budget crisis.

Farmers also worry about the changes that a thriving river will bring to the landscape, says Jason Phillips, the San Joaquin restoration project manager at the Bureau of Reclamation.

"People have been farming right up to the river, even driving through it," he says. "They're not used to having endangered species issues to deal with."

Those unaccustomed to living by a real river might face some initial inconvenience, says Dave Koehler, director of the San Joaquin River Parkway and Conservation Trust, a nonprofit that has been fighting for the river's restoration since 1988. But he says the project will ultimately yield economic benefits to the entire river community.

Downstream farmers will be able to irrigate their fields with fresh river water, instead of paying to clean polluted groundwater, proponents say. Commercial fishermen will benefit if the salmon populations rebound. And perhaps most importantly, the new flows are expected to improve water quality in the Bay-Delta, the source of drinking water for 22 million Californians.

BRINGING BACK THE FISH

Starting Thursday, Friant Dam will release up to an additional 200 cubic feet of water per second. If you pulled the plug on an Olympic-sized swimming pool, the flow would be enough to drain all the water in about seven minutes.

It's also just enough to moisten the dry stretches in places like Kerman. But in the spring, the water from the dam will quadruple, and the parched ditches will fill from bank to bank.

It shouldn't take long for vegetation to come back.

"A cottonwood can grow to 25 feet in five years," says Monty Schmitt, a senior NRDC scientist who has worked on the San Joaquin project for almost a decade. Schmitt expects birds and mammals to follow: great blue herons, snowy egrets, Swainson's hawks, wood ducks, coyote, fox.

And salmon. Scientists will harvest eggs from other Central Valley rivers, raise the young in a hatchery near Friant Dam and release them into the river by December 2012.

There's a lot to be done before the salmon can return, though. During the first two years, flows from the dam will be intermittent so that the restoration team can carve a path for the fish, erecting screens so they won't get stranded, and creating a ¾-mile bypass around the historic Mendota dam.

Overgrowth will be cleared and channels widened to hold all the new water. Scientists will have to ensure that it stays cool, because salmon require water temperatures of 70 degrees or below.

It might seem like a lot of work for a bunch of fish. But as Schmitt likes to remind people, "It's about more than just salmon."

FERTILIZING AN ECOSYSTEM

The fish will benefit the entire ecosystem, feeding animals and fertilizing plants, says Jon Rosenfield, a biologist with the Bay Institute conservation group.

"When returning salmon die," Rosenfield says, "their carcasses are dragged out of the water by rodents and birds, and the nutrients are distributed across the watershed."

Scientists have even found the ocean's chemical signature in grapes planted alongside salmon-rich rivers, providing evidence that the returning fish have enriched the soil.

On a recent Saturday, the late summer sun scorched Lost Lake Park, a recreation area on a verdant stretch of the San Joaquin -- one that hasn't been parched by restricted flows from the dam. A handful of families picnicked on the banks in the shade of cottonwoods and alders.

Schmitt hopes the now-dry sections of the river will one day draw crowds like this one.

So does Walt Shubin, the 79-year-old farmer, who remembers paddling down the river in a boat he made in high school shop class, scaring ducks and geese that fed on the tall grasses.

"When the river is wet," Schmitt says, "Walt and I will go canoeing."

What Ever Happened to the Climate Bill?

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

U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, a Michigan Democrat, is one of more than a dozen swing votes needed to pass a climate bill this year. To get her off the fence and into the climate bill camp, Sen. Barbara Boxer wanted to take Stabenow into the wilds of Alaska this summer, to show her first-hand the devastation wrought by warmer temperatures -- drying wetlands, dying forests, disappearing glaciers and more.

But the tour never happened. Sen. Ted Kennedy's death forced Boxer and her colleagues to cancel the trip to attend his memorial service. Stabenow remains on the fence.

The trip cancellation was yet another disappointment for advocates of climate change legislation, which has become the hapless victim of unrelated delays and deviations all summer.

Kennedy's passing, the protracted health care debate, even Sen. John Kerry's hip surgery have pushed back committee debates and a floor vote -- which advocates had hoped would come in September -- to sometime later this fall. Kerry, for instance, chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, one of six committees that claim some jurisdiction over climate legislation, and is co-authoring the Senate version of a climate bill with Boxer, so his input was essential.

Now, as President Obama prepares to address the United Nations on Tuesday and assure the world that the United States is getting serious about climate change in advance of important December talks in Copenhagen, some backers fear that consideration of a bill by the full Senate will slip to next year -- into the witch's brew of midterm election politics when little significant work gets done.

"The Senate is a lot about time management. You have to take into account how much time your priorities take," said Paul Bledsoe, director of communications and strategy for the National Commission on Energy Policy. "It looks like we could be running out of time to get Senate floor consideration before Copenhagen."

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid stoked those fears last week when he told reporters that health care and regulatory reform may dominate the rest of this year's session, meaning there would likely be no time for clean energy legislation.

A delay could embarrass the Obama administration. Obama has said that he wants the U.S. delegation to show up at Copenhagen with legislation that has passed both chambers of Congress. The first half of that goal was achieved in June with narrow passage of cap-and-trade legislation by the U.S. House, but the Senate has yet to act on that bill or consider its own version.

Here are three factors that could stand in the way of a climate bill's passage in the Senate this year - and three things that might help it succeed:

OBSTACLES

Health care reform: Until Senate leaders deal with Obama's No. 1 domestic priority, which currently dominates the Senate schedule and the national conversation, nothing else will get done. Success would benefit the rest of the president's agenda, giving him momentum and prodding reluctant Democrats into backing the administration on climate change. A failure on health care could give moderates more reason to abandon the president while seeking to shore up their own re-election bids.

Annual appropriations bills: The Senate still needs to pass a bevy of spending bills to fund the government for the coming year. Each of these eats up time in committees and on the Senate floor. At some point, the climate bill may simply get crowded out of the schedule because other legislation just can't wait.

Fence-sitting Democrats: Michigan's Stabenow and at least nine other Rust Belt Democrats are worried that climate change legislation will raise costs in the manufacturing sector and send jobs overseas. Other Democrats are worried about the cost of the bill. Others want to drop the cap-and-trade provisions altogether.

If the House bill is any guide, wavering senators can extract a high price for their vote. Rep. Rick Boucher, a Democrat from rural Virginia, brokered a deal that gave the coal industry billions of dollars in concessions. Senate Democrats may be forced to make similar unsavory agreements to get the 60 votes needed to overcome a GOP filibuster.

BRIGHT SPOTS

EPA action: In gathering votes, Democratic leaders have gotten help from an unlikely source: John Roberts' Supreme Court. Two years ago, the court ruled 5-4 that the EPA has the authority to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. The agency has recently been taking steps to that end.

The EPA action allows climate bill backers to use a carrot-and-stick approach, suggesting that their undecided colleagues get involved in crafting a compromise bill to address greenhouse emissions -- or risk having the EPA do it without their input.

"It's either act, or have the White House act," said Daniel Weiss, director of climate strategy at the Center for American Progress. "That will make the choice clearer for members of the Senate

Green lobbying: Environmentalists and their allies recently launched their biggest lobbying push yet on climate change. The Clean Energy Works Campaign allots a reported $20 million for advertising outside the Beltway, making the fundamental argument that climate legislation will create new jobs in the clean energy sector and boost the U.S. economy while reducing greenhouse gas pollution.

The campaign aims to counter a rival assault from a pair of business groups, the National Association of Manufacturers and the National Federation of Independent Business, which ran ads in 13 states denouncing a cap-and-trade system as a "huge tax on energy."

New York climate meeting: The president will have a chance to reframe and reinvigorate the climate debate on Tuesday when he addresses a one-day climate conference at the United Nations headquarters in New York -- part of the run-up to Copenhagen.

In an approach somewhat reminiscent of his recent health care speech before a joint session of Congress, Obama will try to jumpstart progress with a speech to the nation. In this case, he will also be speaking to the international community, walking a tightrope between reassuring skittish swing-vote Democrats at home and demonstrating abroad that he is still serious about climate change.

"There are no stages as big as when the president of the United States addresses the world," said Jeremy Symons, a senior vice president at the National Wildlife Federation. "It's the president stepping out in a big way. It should take this fight to the next level.

"The time to do it is right now. That's our game plan."

Just Food

Elizabeth Royte — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

When my daughter recently returned from a class trip to a farmers' market, she handed me a vocabulary list: "Food miles," one entry read. "The distance a food must travel from farm to plate. The farther the distance, the more impact on our environment (transportation pollution) and the more need to preserve and package the food."

The concept of food miles is easy to grasp, and many consumers concerned with their earthly footprint have grasped it hard. But recent studies show that transportation, on average, consumes far less energy than producing and processing food. So focusing exclusively on eating locally, writes James E. McWilliams in Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, is not "a viable answer to sustainable food production on a global level."

McWilliams, a history scholar who casts himself as a contrarian, frets about "locavores" because he considers them a threat to progress. He worries they'll realize too late that their dreams are unrealistic, and they'll miss the chance to "regroup and pursue more achievable approaches." (Never mind that the local-food movement never pretended that eating locally-or even regionally-would, on its own, move the world toward food security.) Instead, to grow more food on less or the same amount of land and to feed an eventual world population of nine billion, McWilliams recommends judicious use of both genetically modified organisms and the synthetic chemicals of conventional agriculture. The risk of synthetic pesticides has been overstated, he asserts (indeed, they're much safer now than in Rachel Carson's day), while organic agriculture's reliance on chemicals has been understated. Just because a toxin is natural, he says, doesn't mean it's less worrisome.

Like other proponents of genetic modification, McWilliams claims that relying only on organic agriculture, which he says "generally" yields less per acre than conventional farming, will diminish biodiversity as farmers clear rainforests to plant. But the case is far from proved; the question of yield remains one of the most debated points in agriculture. Inarguably, organic methods regenerate soil over time, while conventional methods tend to deplete it. And aren't we already clearing rainforests-to grow genetically modified soybeans to feed factory cattle?

Although McWilliams gives locavores credit for raising awareness, he also calls them "cowardly" for focusing on themselves instead of the potential benefits of globalization. If we deny Africans our biotechnology, they will be left unable to mass-produce their own food (or have any to trade) and will still need us to feed them. In April 2008, the United Nations International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development came to the opposite conclusion, recommending that developing nations base their future food production not on genetically modified organisms but on agro-ecological and sustainable strategies.

McWilliams does promote,sometimes with barely a sentence, many sound and noncontroversial solutions: renewable energy for powering food production, a meatless diet, efficient transportation, the recycling of agricultural waste, and the use of life cycle assessments to make better food choices. But almost all of these ideas have been covered in other, less propagandistic books. Ultimately, Just Food makes a shallow read: McWilliams attacks locavores, who turn out to be straw men; stakes out a slightly provocative, nonideological middle ground in the debate between high yield and high sustainability; then joins the food-movement chorus in calling for specific reforms. How contrarian is that?

A Sea Less Hospitable to Life

Molly Webster — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Four years ago wild-oyster fishermen in Washington State began to notice something rather strange going on. In the brackish waters of Willapa Bay, where cold, nutrient-rich water from the deep ocean wells up and nourishes the oysters and their young, larvae were dying at alarming rates. They simply weren't building shells and growing into adults. Desperate to find answers, the fishermen called the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for help.

A group of NOAA scientists took on the case. Could acidity be to blame? Acid in the ocean is formed when carbon dioxide from the air mixes with saltwater in the sea; when put together, the two undergo a chemical reaction and form carbonic acid. As we pump more carbon dioxide into the air, the result is more carbonic acid in the ocean. And with that increase in acid molecules, the availability of carbonate -- an essential component of shells -- declines. In fact, if acidity gets high enough, shells begin to dissolve. Because of the complexities of ocean science, only recently have we been able to detect these changes in pH, and biologists have only recently begun to grasp just how sensitive organisms are to these fluctuations.

"We look out at the ocean, and it seems fine. It's hard to see what's going on beneath the surface," says NRDC ocean initiative director Sarah Chasis. "But around the world, ocean acidity has increased 30 percent since the time before the industrial revolution."

Climate models predict that, on average, ocean acidity levels will double by the end of the century, threatening not just mollusks and species that build shells but the entire web of ocean life. Plankton, all the way down at the bottom of the food chain, also need to build shells to survive, and as their numbers dwindle, so too will the fish that eat them: haddock, flounder, shrimp, salmon, and pollock, to name a few. We in turn eat those fish, and their value to commercial fisheries is in the billions of dollars a year.

The challenge is to make this invisible crisis visible to the general public and to federal policy makers. In August, NRDC released Acid Test, a documentary film narrated by Sigourney Weaver and distributed by the Discovery Channel's Planet Green.

Acid Test delivered a blunt message to a national TV audience: if we do nothing to reverse the acidification process, coral reefs could vanish within 30 years, jeopardizing hundreds of thousands of marine species they support. If ocean acidity continues to increase, we'll see a lot worse than baby mollusks not being able to build shells.

NRDC hopes growing awareness on Capitol Hill of ocean acidification will play a role in ensuring that the American Clean Energy and Security Act includes provisions that would specifically regulate CO2 emissions (in addition to other greenhouse gas emissions that contribute to global warming but do not contribute to ocean acidification). We also need to move forward in developing a national ocean policy that would reestablish ocean health by reducing overfishing and creating marine protected areas -- essentially, national parks for the sea. Such protection is critical: just as the human body is more susceptible to infection when it is exhausted and malnourished, the ocean is more vulnerable to the effects of acidification and warmer temperatures when its overall health is compromised.

"If the ocean is healthy, it can better handle the impact of carbon pollution," says Lisa Suatoni, a biologist with NRDC's ocean initative (see "Whatever It Takes," this issue). "Areas set aside as preserves can nurture source populations of marine species for the rest of the ocean, helping it weather the storms of change."

This summer ushered in a welcome sign of progress. In June, President Barack Obama announced the formation of an Ocean Policy Task Force (see "The Law of the Sea," this issue) charged with creating comprehensive ocean protection policies -- a sort of Clean Air Act for the seas. The United States controls more ocean area than any other country in the world, but in a rather scattered fashion: some 140 different laws and 20 different federal agencies regulate its use. Chasis and Suatoni are pleased that the federal government has begun to take steps toward establishing a single set of ocean rules. "Seventy-one percent of the planet's surface is covered by the ocean," Chasis says. "We often forget this, so we forget to protect it." Soon, she hopes, the old maxim "out of sight, out of mind" will no longer apply to our seas.

NRDC: Combining New and Old

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

Staff Scientist Sylvia Fallon focuses on the role of genetics in identifying and protecting endangered species. We asked how her work might benefit from the Encyclopedia of Life.

Taxonomy has been around for a long time. Has genetics opened up new ways of thinking about it?

With the advent of genetic techniques, there has been a shift away from more traditional ways of describing species, such as morphological measurements or field-based observations of behavior and ecology. In fact, I've seen several articles recently lamenting the "death" of taxonomy. But genetics also has its limitations, and the traditional taxonomic approaches can add real value to our understanding of the biology and function of species. I believe it's important not to look at one without the other, and the species pages being designed by the encyclopedia should make it easier to assess both kinds of information.

Why is it important to name and describe species?

Species are the main currency of biodiversity. Identifying and counting individual species gives us an understanding of the diversity of life around us. It also provides us with the vocabulary to be able to categorize and communicate about the natural world.

Why focus on protecting species rather than ecosystems?

Both species and ecosystem protection are important and NRDC works to achieve both. In the United States, one of our most effective conservation laws is the Endangered Species Act, which functions at the species level. However, by focusing our efforts on keystone species whose presence have effects throughout their broader ecosystem, such as wolves, grizzlies, and buffalo, we are able to protect many other species -- from plants to fish to birds -- and ensure a healthy ecosystem.

What are the greatest threats to species?

The greatest threat to species has traditionally been loss of habitat due to expanding human populations. Other threats include overharvesting, the introduction of invasive species, and toxic pollutants. Looking forward, however, global warming is fast becoming the number one threat to many species. We are working on species ranging from the polar bear, whose habitat is melting right out from under it, to the whitebark pine, a high-elevation tree species (and important food source for grizzlies) that is suffering from a combination of factors that are exacerbated by elevated temperatures.

How is global warming going to affect biodiversity?

There is no single answer to this question and the outcome is likely to be incredibly complex, with some species ranges shifting into new areas, for example, and other species having more difficulty adapting. The most important strategy for heading off a large number of species extinctions is to address the causes of global warming and slow its effects to the greatest extent possible. The second most important thing we can do is protect large, interconnected landscapes that will provide the opportunity for species to move and adapt to a changing climate.

Happy Birthday to Us - 30 Years and Counting

Douglas S. Barasch — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

With this issue, we're 30 years young. Magazines -- especially these days -- come and go, or shrink in size, or in their ambition. But OnEarth has thrived while remaining true to its mission: publish fresh analysis of the environment, with rigor and originality. We share much of the DNA of our parent organization, NRDC: no surprise there, since the organization and OnEarth were founded by the same indomitable, visionary man, John Adams. We're feisty; we have a strong point of view, yet we believe facts and data are more powerful than ideology or politics. We can be wonky, but we're guided by our instincts and our hearts. We know how to tell a good story. And we possess an undying devotion to the planet and its endless capacity to uplift and inspire.

This essential credo has remained the foundation of NRDC and the magazine since it launched in 1979 as The Amicus Journal, in recognition of the organization's basic function and make-up at the time: NRDC was then a relatively small group of scrappy lawyers who sued polluters and, when necessary, the government to make sure it enforced a new generation of environmental laws -- such as the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts -- that NRDC helped create.

Both NRDC and its magazine have evolved in the ensuing decades, but the ties between them and their shared mission remain strong. Through this special relationship, OnEarth has consistently broken ground on new and underreported stories. We were the first national publication to document the strange, mysterious disappearance of bees and to consider the possible causes; we explored the implications of a society that purchases three billion prescription drugs per year, which, once ingested and disposed of, enter our water supply; we probed the unexplored risks of nanotechnology, which is fast becoming a $3-trillion industry, though it is almost entirely unregulated. We could go on. Our work has been recognized by many awards, anthologized, and picked up by other media.

We regularly tackle big stories, like this issue's cover article on the public-health implications of a new wave of climate-related diseases, by KIM LARSEN. But we also love smaller, more quirky tales, like the one by contributing editor ALAN BURDICK, who writes about an iguana-loving taxonomist revolutionizing the art and science of classifying all the known species on our planet -- on the Web; or the one by RICK BASS, another contributing editor, about his trek through the French Pyrenees in search of the region's last surviving brown bears. Over the years, we have sent our award-winning correspondents and photographers far and wide, from Bangladesh to Mali, from Inez, Kentucky, to Snake Valley, Nevada.

Like most 30-year-olds, we still feel youthful and robust, curious and irrepressible, and we are even going through some new life changes on the Web. Green fads have come and gone; so have environmental magazines. But we're still here, and it seems we have more stories than ever to tell.

Africa on the Auction Block

Bruce Stutz — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Between 2007 and 2008 worldwide grain prices almost doubled. Food riots shook Haiti and many parts of Africa, and wealthy nations with growing populations dependent on agricultural imports stepped up their search for alternatives to secure their own future food supplies -- as well as lucrative new sources of biofuels. The Gulf states, India, South Korea, and others have bought up millions of acres of farmland in places like Madagascar, Mozambique, Sudan, and Ethiopia, some of the poorest, hungriest, and most politically unstable nations in sub-Saharan Africa.

The International Food Policy Research Institute, a Washington, D.C.–based think tank, estimates that since 2006 as many as 50 million acres, equal to all the farmland in France, have been the target of foreign purchasers. Sometimes the land is leased rather than sold outright, and the leases can be very long: 50 to 99 years. While a number of the deals are struck directly between governments, most involve private companies as well. And the lure of raising increasingly valuable crops on relatively cheap farmland, where labor costs are low, has also engaged the interest of private investment funds.

Will the quest for food security or profit bring much-needed investments in these poor host nations? Will it bring jobs, schools, roads, hospitals, irrigation, technology, port facilities, and revenue from export duties? Or will these vast "land grabs," as some NGOs have called them, mark the beginning of a new era of agricultural colonialism, in which local farmers and herders are forced off their land and left to labor on foreign-owned plantations producing food for export?

It's too early to tell. A June 2009 report by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), the U.N.'s International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), and the private International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), sought to assess the impact of the land acquisitions. It found few paper trails to follow and even fewer details of what the deals entailed. They have been struck with no oversight from international bodies and seemingly little input from local communities, and have sometimes been committed to without the knowledge or consent of elected officials.

In some cases this egregious lack of transparency has had dire results. The Ugandan parliament had to step in and halt a deal -- on which it had never been consulted -- that would have leased two million acres of the country's farmland to firms representing the Egyptian government. When it was announced last year that Madagascar's president had unilaterally agreed to grant the South Korean company Daewoo Logistics a 99-year lease on 3.2 million acres -- nearly half the country's arable land -- to raise corn for export, the public protests were one of the factors that led to the president's ouster by military coup.

Reports of new deals, however, are unabating. The Republic of Congo is said to be intending to lease some 25 million acres to South African farmers. Saudi Arabia has decided to quit farming water-intensive wheat crops altogether on its own small reserves of farmland and is looking to lease 1.2 million acres in Tanzania, adding to its already substantial holdings in Ethiopia and Sudan, in order to produce the 2.6 million tons of wheat it says it needs per year.

"I'm not at all convinced [these deals] will be anything but predatory," says Alexandra Spieldoch of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy, a nonprofit research institute that analyzes global trade policies.

While she recognizes Africa's desperate need for investment in agriculture, her concern with the transactions is their inherently "lopsided power relationships" -- not only the imbalance between the wealth of the investors and that of the host countries, but also between those within the countries who are making the deals and the local communities whose land is being bargained away.

This is especially problematic in Africa, where those who live on the land and farm it may not hold any registered title. The FAO-IFAD-IIED report found that this gave government and private investors the mistaken impression that Africa has a surfeit of under-utilized fertile land. The reality, the report said, is that lands not seen as commercially productive often "play a crucial role in local livelihood and food security strategies." This is especially true in sub-Saharan Africa, where some 60 million pastoralists live, and where land that elsewhere might be considered available, idle, or unproductive may be valuable for shifting cultivation and dry-season grazing.

A separate June 2009 report by the U.N. special rapporteur on the right to food also warned that the new investors -- both private and government -- might find it more cost-effective to create large-scale plantations that rely on environmentally damaging intensive and mechanized farming methods.

The future of these deals may ultimately depend on how quickly the world's food needs grow and how quickly scarcity translates into rising prices -- just as the search for new sources of energy increases along with oil prices. Despite the cheap land, these are expensive ventures that require a great deal of new infrastructure. And they are not without risk: many of the countries in question are politically volatile. That is why the United Nations hopes it can convince both host and investor countries of the importance of making considered and transparent deals.

"There are large areas of rural Africa with few economic opportunities," says Michael Taylor, Africa program manager for the International Land Coalition, an NGO based in Italy. "These projects could bring new employment. But local people should be asked, consulted, and allowed to negotiate face-to-face with investors. It's not only a land rights issue. It's a human rights issue."

NRDC in the News: Fall 2009

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

"'[Car] companies and the Obama administration know that the only way they can survive is if they are making more cleaner, high-mileage cars,' said David Doniger, climate policy director at NRDC."

--From "Safety Could Suffer if We Boost Mileage by Making Cars Smaller," USA Today, May 19, 2009

"'There is a lot of investment for clean energy and technology, but there is nothing in there for transportation infrastructure,' [said Deron Lovaas, NRDC's transportation policy director]. 'The two bills, climate and transportation, will have to complement each other. That is the dance that Energy and Commerce... will need to perform.'"

--From "With Highway Bill on the Distant Horizon, Reformers Eye Climate Measure to Make a Splash," nytimes.com, Greenwire, June 11, 2009

"'In the early years, protecting the environment was not a popular notion,' said Robert Redford. 'I used to help everyone that I could [who was fighting for the earth]...but I soon realized that was taking too much energy. So I decided to focus on a group that would have the most impact. I thought of NRDC because they could sue to protect it.'"

--From "Robert Redford on Paul Newman, Sundance and the Increasingly Crucial Fight to Save the Earth," thedailygreen.com, July 6, 2009

Q & A: The Big Dig

Hillary Rosner — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

In his nearly 40-year career as a hydrogeologist and geochemist, Robert Moran has crisscrossed the globe studying the impact of mining on water, both below and above ground. For the past dozen years, he's worked as a consultant for nonprofits in diverse places such as Romania, Peru, and Kyrgyzstan, helping local communities understand the realities of metal mining. Until late 2008 the industry was booming amid what PricewaterhouseCoopers called an "unparalleled period of soaring commodity prices and economic growth." The global recession put a halt to that -- but it could be temporary. Once the economy picks up, fast-developing nations like China will be "looking for metals anywhere they can get them," as Moran puts it -- which generally means in less developed countries, where lack of oversight could wreak environmental havoc. Hillary Rosner spoke to Moran at his home on Lookout Mountain, Colorado.

Give me a quick overview of the mining industry today.

It's huge. I don't pretend to know the number of companies involved, but it must be in the thousands. In general, it's the smaller ones that are the least careful about environmental and socioeconomic concerns. Often they don't care; often they fly under the radar; often they don't have the resources. The big publicly traded international companies have to report to their stockholders. If I had to generalize, I'd say they were much better than the smaller companies.

You used to consult for big mining companies, and now you're consulting for the nonprofits fighting against them. How did that happen?

It's a kind of natural progression you see in a lot of scientists. As you mature, you look a bit more carefully at the consequences of what you're doing. When I said controversial things about projects I was working on, the companies would put them in reports and lock them in a safe somewhere, and they'd never see the light of day. I got tired of that. It was clear that the public-interest side was being outgunned time after time. So I did make a conscious effort to switch sides.

You're working on a project right now in Guatemala. Tell me a bit about that.

It's called the Marlin mine. It's a gold and silver mine in the western highlands of Guatemala that a lot of the local people have opposed. There's a good chance that the project would contaminate their water and that their springs would dry up, and they feel as if they haven't been consulted.

I read that one local opponent of the project was just killed.

Sadly, such things do happen when companies operate without restraints from host government agencies, when they don't bother to work out some sort of give-and-take with the citizens. The violence isn't all on one side; citizens who feel they are outgunned may also resort to violence. But it's the companies that have all the assets and all the power.

And think they're above the law?

For thousands of years metals have had two basic uses: as weapons and as money. That means they have an automatic connection to central governments and automatic protection. Mining companies have always felt able to walk into the prime minister or whomever and say, look, we want to do such and such. And regardless of what the rules may say, they've done it. The level of corruption is phenomenal. In the majority of countries in the developing world there really isn't effective oversight. Several times in Latin America I've asked knowledgeable audiences what the word for "enforcement" is and the room goes silent.

There seems to be a clear correlation between mining and poverty.

Yes, most metal mining occurs in developing countries. And even in the United States mining has always been concentrated in states and regions with some of the lowest levels of economic development: rural Idaho, rural Montana, rural Arizona. There are almost no mines being opened in highly developed parts of the United States or Western Europe. Companies just can't get approval any more.

Why is that?

Think of the Kennecott copper operations in Salt Lake City. Those mines have caused some of the most extensive groundwater contamination I've seen anywhere in the world. But eventually the state and the Environmental Protection Agency brought lots of legal actions and forced Kennecott to build water treatment plants and supply alternative water sources for the Salt Lake suburbs. It's cost them hundreds of millions of dollars. No company wants to take on that kind of liability. So that's one reason corporations look more and more to the developing world.

Isn't it depressing, constantly being the little guy in these fights?

It can be, but there's a perverse side of me that enjoys provoking the corporations and the regulators. I use the metaphor of opening the box. The flow of information is almost totally controlled by the mining industry. So part of my role is to help people see what the main questions are, get the dialogue going. It's not to tell people that they should or shouldn't mine. I've worked with indigenous groups who often don't have a lot of choice. They're really poor, so they want a mining project to go forward because they want the jobs -- they just want to minimize the impacts. It's never going to be perfect. But once we open the box, it's up to the local citizens to decide whether the consequences are acceptable.

Once people have that information, can it change the outcome?

I'm working now in Alaska with a broad coalition of commercial fishermen, environmentalists, NGOs, and university staff, who are opposing the development of a huge copper-gold-molybdenum mine in the headwaters of the largest remaining wild-salmon fishery in the world, above Bristol Bay. Most of the company data have been kept secret. Or the company drags its feet and releases part of it or partitions it into so many tiny pieces that no human could ever make sense of it. But the people I'm working with are well organized and almost well enough funded that they can make the issues public and change the dynamic.

We hear a lot these days about a growing world water crisis. How is mining related to that?

In much of the world, companies are given access to water for their industrial processes free of charge. They may pay for pipelines and so on, but the commodity, the water itself, has no cost. That will have to change. Water should be controlled as a collective resource, not as private property, and societies are going to have to put a true market price on the industrial use of water that factors in the real cost of its depletion and contamination.

I've heard you're also looking at the impact of mining on the oceans.

Last November I was in Papua New Guinea talking about a proposed metal mining project, promoted by the European Union, that would dump waste into the ocean in an area that contains some of the best reefs in the world. You can get around the problem of the local impact if you build a long pipeline and dispose of the waste in deep water. On land, you can go in and physically see the effects, take samples. But in this case, you may be 3,000 feet under the surface. The cost and difficulty of monitoring in that setting are phenomenal. So I think that's a trend we're going to see: more ocean dumping. And also a lot more ocean-bed mining in international waters, where there really isn't any agreement about who the governing bodies are.

A lot of what you've said seems to revolve around the idea of lawlessness. Aren't you concerned for your own safety?

Yes, I've become more and more wary. I require my clients to have some security measures. That doesn't necessarily mean we have bodyguards, although sometimes we do. I don't travel by myself anywhere. I don't stay in hotels that make me vulnerable. I once had my computer stolen in Peru; it was clear they were after the hard drive. My work has been involved in getting several multimillion dollar projects shut down, so I'd be a fool if I didn't take it seriously.

A Dream of Bears

Rick Bass — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Where I live, in the mountains of northwest Montana, in the Yaak Valley, I can walk back and forth between two countries, two cultures, the United States and Canada. I love the feeling of sanctity afforded by the rugged mountains. We even have grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) -- a close relative of the European brown bear (Ursus arctos arctos) -- though we don't have very many of them: perhaps only two dozen or so.

For these reasons, I have a deep affinity for the wild landscape of the Pyrenees, where the population of brown bears is similarly reduced -- perhaps 20 in the central Pyrenees and only 5 in the western Pyrenees. These last few bears wander between France and Spain, unconcerned with international borders. As in Montana, the inhabitants of the nearby small towns and villages are of mixed opinions about the bear. No species is more powerful, or capable of arousing more fear. Some people, however, are drawn to the habitats of bears, and I am one of them.

I'm traveling with three friends -- the writer Pascal Dessaint, of Toulouse; his wife, Florence; and François Gavillon, a professor of American literature at the Université de Bretagne Occidentale. We stop off in Arbas, in the central Pyrenees. The mayor of this little mountain town, François Arcangéli, is a supporter of bears. He recognizes their economic potential to attract tourists, but also asserts that the bears were here first, and have a right to exist. It turns out that he has traveled all over the world, visiting other rural communities that have learned -- or are learning -- to coexist with bears: places in Slovenia, Spain, Italy, and Montana.

"Every issue in my village is related to the bear," he says, referring to the power even a few bears hold over people's emotions. The bears arouse great passion in people who are for them as well as against them. Livestock owners are compensated if a bear kills any of their animals, and the government provides assistance to protect their stock: electric fences and portable gates. However, many of them refuse this because they believe it would send a signal that they support bear recovery. "It's complicated," Arcangéli says.

Bears have coexisted with humans for thousands of years. He tells us that scientists discovered a clay statue of a bear, far back in the mountains, that might be 10,000 years old. No one is sure what the statue's purpose was, but clearly some ceremony was involved, some accordance of great respect.

"There has to be some kind of solution," Arcangéli says.

Seclusion has always pretty much defined the town of Cominac, an hour south of Arbas. This region of France, known as the Couserans, has always had its own distinct identity, and has always identified deeply with bears, which once were numerous throughout the forests, browsing on mast, like boars. Citizens would capture cubs from their dens and raise them as pets. Nineteenth-century photographs show women and children walking down the streets with bears on chain leashes, as if they were but poodles, while other photos, more disturbing, show bears in manacles, shackles, and leather muzzles, like tortured detainees. Somewhere respect seems to have filtered out of the relationship. Cominac became known as le pays des montreurs d'ours -- roughly translatable as "the country of those who put bears on display."

We set out before daylight, for we have a long hike ahead of us in search of a shepherd. We have been told he supports the recovery of bears, despite the fact that they sometimes kill and eat sheep.

At a pass, a notch in the mountains, we pause at Le Chemin de la Liberté, the Freedom Trail, the route taken by French Jews fleeing the Holocaust, seeking refuge on the other side of the mountains, in Spain. Pascal's wife, Florence, is particularly silent; receptive, I've noticed, to the landscape's moods at every turn. It's humbling to be standing in the same place with hardly a care in the world: not in frantic flight for our lives but as visitors dressed for the journey, and making it at our leisure, with only that thinnest breach of time separating us.

Pascal inhales the morning air deeply and grins. We study the map of the immense mountain range. He points out the various high alpine meadows where the shepherd might be.

We start out hiking through an ancient beech forest, the new green leaves of summer filtering the sunstruck morning fog into a beguiling, diffused light that shimmers gold. It's enchanting. We walk in stunned silence. Pascal and François are energetic, powerful walkers, thrilled to be in big country. I recognize many of the same mountain flowers that cheer me on my walks in Montana. Pyrenean chamois, a kind of small antelope, charge across a rocky slope near a sheepherder's abandoned stone cabin. I keep searching for bear tracks on the trail, claw marks on the trees, but find none.

There is no sign of other humans, in valley after valley. It begins to rain, a cold, blowing rain with tatters of fog shrouding the mountains and hurtling past us. Finally, in midafternoon, we find our shepherd and his flock, deeper into the rain. The mountains are so lush and green that it seems they are hissing with new growth. Francis Chevillon is standing out in the rain with a crookstaff, while two of his dogs dash and play at his feet. He's wearing tall rubber boots and a broad canvas hat with two vulture feathers stuck in it. Although he doesn't seem overwhelmed with happiness to see us, he does invite us into his tiny stone cabin.

Francis is a gaunt man, his ascetic appearance heightened by a huge and unruly gray beard that seems perfectly counterbalanced by clear blue-gray eyes. He's glad to see that we've brought food for a feast. "It's hard to cook for one," he admits. Seeing us shiver, he gets up and lights a small fire. He slices cheese and bread, pours wine.

"Every shepherd must have a sickness to survive," Francis says, pointing to his books. "Mine is reading." Ever since he was a small child, he says, he has always gone off alone to read.

He has never seen a bear in the Pyrenees, he says, but wants very much to see one. He says that bears force people in his profession to be good shepherds -- to do the kind of job they should already be doing, keeping a close eye on their flocks.

"It takes a pure heart to see a bear," he says, then shakes his head slowly, as if he has been trying but has not yet been found worthy.

We visit for almost two hours, with a steady rain falling and a few cows standing right outside the open door, looking in. Francis says he loves the rain because it allows him to catch up on his reading; the sheep huddle together down in the trees, and do not need herding. "Anyone who does not love the mountains in the rain," he says, "does not know the mountains."

We hiked seven hard up-and-down hours to get here, and even though the return trip is mostly downhill, we'll need at least five to get back. It will be a long day and a late night. We say our good-byes and rise. Francis follows us out into the rain, and I get the feeling he has just started to warm up to us. He's saying how elephants are his favorite animal, how he has journeyed to India to see them, to be with them...

We reach our cars in the last blue twilight of dusk and drive out of the mountains, having seen no bears but having encountered those whose hearts long and wait for them. We travel down into the village of Seix, where, muddy and fatigued, we are nonetheless welcomed into the dry, warm, well-lit elegance of La Gourmandine restaurant. And here, finally, we find our first opposition to bears. It comes from none other than our waitress. It turns out that she, Alexandrine Dougnac-Galant, is the great-granddaughter of one of the original montreurs d'ours from Cominac. As soon as we start talking about bears, she crosses her arms, pales a little, and takes two steps back, so that she is almost against the wall.

When she was in high school, she says, she spent a summer working for the local forest service. During that time, there was a bear that had learned he could run into a herd of cattle, scare them over the cliffs, and then amble down to the gorge and pick the choicest cuts. On one occasion, it was Alexandrine's job to hike in and retrieve any meat that could be salvaged. It was a gruesome job, she says, and I'm sure it would be terrifying for a laborer of any age.

I don't know what to tell her. Where I live, we have a few bears left, too, I say. There are certain days when I'm far back in the mountains and encounter a grizzly and feel a bolt of fright, it's true. But that's part of what makes the mountains the mountains. I would be very sad if one day there were no bears. It would be a very lonely feeling.

I don't expect to persuade her: not with a foreign phrase, a single exchange, or one meal. But she does listen to what I have to say. That's all anyone can ask on either side, I think. We thank her for her hospitality and compliment her again on the cuisine. "Here is a group of us who have come to see the bears," Florence reminds her. We are your customers, too; the bears can be an asset.

The next morning, we drive for several hours through an intense rainstorm to the far western Pyrenees, to visit one of France's leading bear experts, Jean-Jacques Camarra, who has overseen the recovery plan for these mountains. Pascal apologizes for the weather -- as if he could help it! But I love the fury of the storm and wonder what the bears are doing amid such tumult.

Jean-Jacques meets us in the Aspe Valley, where he lives, just as the weather is breaking, as befits his sunny personality. There are only five bears remaining here in the western Pyrenees, and worse yet, they're all males -- the last native French female, Cannelle, was killed in November 2004. But still Jean-Jacques has hope. He's been following bears around in the Pyrenees since he was a young man (he's in his fifties now), and he says people's attitudes are improving.

As recently as a few years ago, Jean-Jacques says, villagers who heard he was relocating a bear from Slovenia would set up roadblocks and wait with torches and flashlights; would threaten to beat him up. (Three bears were trapped in Slovenia and driven to the French Pyrenees in 1996 and 1997; another five were captured and relocated in 2006.) In the Pyrenees, he says, people are more accepting of the bears' recovering on their own than of their being reintroduced from afar; but with the population so suppressed, that's no longer a biological possibility. Without augmentation from other lands, the Pyrenees' population is doomed to blink out.

Affable, almost effervescent, Jean-Jacques takes us to see the spot where Cannelle was killed. We hike through an old forest of giant beech trees, their thick trunks pale and their broad leaves new green. Jean-Jacques fairly vaults up the trail. The jagged spires and teeth of sheer peaks that ring the Aspe Valley, summoning mountaineers from all over the world, pierce the storm clouds that wreath them and roll through the high passes between the peaks.

I'm frightened to consider the loss of the last of the bears from this magical valley: the magnitude of that reduction, that emptiness.

The path we are following used to lead to a little farming community, Jean-Jacques says, nestled far back in the forest in a small clearing overlooking the gorge where Cannelle met her untimely end. (She died defending one of her cubs -- one of those five remaining males -- against some boar hunters). The community that once existed back here was hit hard by the Battle of Verdun in World War I; every young man who lived here left for it and never returned -- and the old people just slowly faded away, he says.

"Here," Jean-Jacques says, and for the first time his mood turns reflective, even somber. He points across the deep, forested canyon to the base of a cliff. Cannelle got up against that cliff, he says, and had nowhere to turn when the hunters and their dogs approached. She had to charge them and fight it out, but they won.

We eat a little picnic, there in the brief summer sun, staring across at the spot where a great evolutionary gambit, millions of years in the making, has come to an end. The next bear-mother in this part of the Pyrenees will have to be imported from the wilds of Slovenia. And the story will have to begin again, maybe with one of Cannelle's offspring.

We sit there surrounded by ghosts and continue to stare at that last spot, as if sheer desire, or hope alone, or regret, might be sufficient. Our little group of bear enthusiasts sits in the sun, deeply aware of how lucky we are to be in this wedge of time: clinging to peace in a landscape across which two world wars have raged in the last century.

In the end, the bears' survival will depend on the good work of biologists like Jean-Jacques and the vision of François Arcangéli, as well as that of shepherds like Francis Chevillon. In the meantime, a small band of endangered and deeply sentient creatures keeps passing back and forth across these mountains, back and forth from one country to another, as those in trouble have been doing here for a very long time now, traveling these trails through the forest with one goal in mind, survival; seeking solace and refuge in one country or another, though rarely finding it for long.

Google My CO2

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

A disputatious blogger recently worked out that a typical Google search used half as much energy as boiling water for a cup of tea and produced 7 grams of CO2 emissions. It seemed like a classic piece of blogosphere silliness, but the company, which takes its commitment to energy efficiency very seriously, decided to crunch the numbers for itself. It found that the average search actually produces only 0.2 grams of CO2. For good measure, Google also calculated that producing a single cheeseburger generates as much CO2 as 15,000 searches. And to equal the CO2 emissions from the monthly electricity use of an average U.S. household, you’d have to hit that search key 3.1 million times. So click away!

The New Diseases on Our Doorstep

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

Tiny, wizened, and sinewy, Maribel stepped on the leash of her snarling pit bull to keep it from attacking a group of uniformed men and women as they poked through the nooks and crannies of her home. It took all the strength the old woman could muster to hold the furious dog at bay, but she herself showed no sign of indignation at the invasion of her privacy. If anything, she looked resigned and slightly bemused. This lifelong resident of one of the poorest districts of Matamoros, the Mexican town just across the border from Brownsville, Texas, on the Gulf of Mexico, seemed to understand that the operation was, well, for her own good. The técnicos, a vector surveillance team organized and dispatched by the Matamoros Department of Health, were on a seek-and-destroy mission. Their target: mosquito larvae.

In recent days a fresh cluster of dengue fever cases had been confirmed in Maribel's neighborhood. Dengue is endemic in Matamoros; in 2004 a blood-sampling survey found dengue antibodies in 78 percent of the city's residents, which means all who tested positive had been infected with the virus at some point in their lives, though it may have gone undiagnosed. According to José Luís Robles López, the medical services coordinator for the city, dengue's grip has only tightened in the years since. It used to surge from August through October, in the wake of the summer rains, with cases leveling off throughout the rest of the year. But more and more, Robles López says, dengue is diagnosed steadily all year round.

The reasons are many, and Matamoros is not alone. Around the world, the incidence of dengue fever has risen thirtyfold in the last 50 years, with increases across all key indicators: the number of cases, the frequency of epidemics, the severity of the disease, and the geographic range over which outbreaks occur. Each year the virus is responsible for 50 million to 100 million infections, a half-million hospitalizations, and 22,000 deaths in more than 100 countries. Many experts believe that dengue is now the most worrisome arthropod-borne virus, or arbovirus, in the world (arthropods, which include insects, spiders, and crustaceans, have segmented body parts and an exoskeleton). And now it's making its way into the United States.

For most Americans, dengue remains an under-the-radar threat. But as the virus creeps northward, we need to be much more alert. The context for the disease has changed significantly and will continue to do so. Understanding more about dengue can also arm us with perspective on the evolving face of other vector-borne and infectious diseases (a vector is an agent, usually an arthropod, that carries a pathogen from one animal, or host, to another). Dengue's proliferation can be attributed to several interconnected factors: rising temperatures and altered rainfall patterns due to climate change, population booms in impoverished urban areas with inadequate municipal services, increased international travel and trade, compromised or dismantled mosquito-reduction programs, and the glut of man-made containers (especially those made of plastic or rubber) that serve as ideal mosquito breeding sites.

Some or all of these factors affect the transmission patterns of most arboviruses as well as other vector-borne diseases, such as Rocky Mountain spotted fever and Lyme disease, both of which are transmitted by ticks. Mosquito-borne arboviruses include West Nile virus, St. Louis encephalitis, equine encephalitis, chikungunya -- the list goes on. Scientists have documented hundreds of arboviruses. None is as entrenched as dengue, but many are spreading well beyond the areas in which they were originally identified and for which they're often named. Some, such as Lyme disease and West Nile virus, have already exacted a heavy toll on human health in the United States.

Zoonoses -- infections or diseases that are transmissible from vertebrate animals to humans -- add another level of complexity. Many, though far from all, are carried by a vector. But all zoonoses and arboviruses are influenced by a uniquely modern set of ecological disruptions: climate change, deforestation, human migration, urbanization, the intrusion of humans and domestic animals into areas where arthropods flourish, industrialized farming and animal husbandry, and so on.

What's clear is that effective control measures will require coordination across multiple scientific disciplines. "We need to cast a broader net," says Howard Frumkin, director of the National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). "Some of the health problems we face are new, others are reemergent, and the causes are ever more complex." Frumkin sees the need for communication channels to open among nontraditional partners, such as climate scientists and urban planners, park rangers and health departments, eco-database modelers and sewage engineers. The Brownsville-Matamoros border area, a dengue hot spot, focuses a lens on these issues. It demonstrates how pressing and complex the needs are, while at the same time suggesting ways in which collaborative efforts can begin to meet those needs before our health-care defenses are overwhelmed.

Maribel's little homestead consists of several one-room shacks with sagging mattresses inside and tattered curtains for doors. These are flanked by a long, narrow yard strewn with the kind of stuff the prosperous world discards and the impoverished world hoards: hubcaps, the moldering backseat from a car, a dilapidated doghouse filled with stacks of decomposing newspaper, lidless paint cans, an oversize plastic sink set at an angle on the ground.

On the day I visited with the surveillance team, they cruised the yard, upending anything that contained water or had the potential to do so. They tossed a larvicide called Abate, a granular substance resembling bird seed, into corners and crevices. A técnico named Carmelo peered inside a shed and pulled out a grimy plastic bowl. It was half filled from rain and teeming with mosquito larvae suspended like tiny apostrophes in the water. Before flinging the bowl's contents to the ground, where the larvae would quickly die, he scooped out a portion into a plastic beaker and added a sprinkle of Abate to demonstrate how efficiently it worked. Within minutes the larvae began to sink to the bottom of the beaker, dead. Satisfying, but it begged the question: How many larvae nurseries had escaped the team's detection? What about the yard next door? And the one next to that? Carmelo conceded my point. "Nothing's perfect, but you can't do this job unless you believe in it," he told me, after sternly instructing Maribel on yard maintenance and the importance of seeking medical attention at the first sign of fever. "We don't eliminate disease, but we do tamp it down."

Dengue's threat is not always apparent to residents of even the most plagued communities, largely because it is maddeningly unpredictable in its presentation. Anywhere from 50 percent to 80 percent of dengue cases are entirely asymptomatic; infected individuals are oblivious to their condition. Mild cases are indistinguishable from garden-variety seasonal flu -- fever, achiness, fatigue. More severe cases explain why the ailment is sometimes called breakbone fever: sufferers experience excruciating muscle and joint pain, along with high fever, rash, and gastritis, among other complaints. In some instances dengue fever leads to dengue hemorrhagic fever (DHF), which is marked by severe circulatory problems and internal bleeding. This can be life-threatening, especially if it progresses to the rare but even more lethal dengue shock syndrome.

The precipitous rise of DHF throughout the Americas over the past decade, most notably in Brazil, Colombia, Honduras, Mexico, and Venezuela, has a lot to do with the emergence of four separate dengue serotypes, DEN-1, -2, -3, and -4. (A serotype is a disease variation, caused by differing proteins on the surface of the virus, that is recognized as distinct by the immune system.) Recovery from a bout of dengue from one serotype leaves an individual with lifelong immunity to further infection from that serotype. However, for reasons that epidemiologists are still trying to understand, if this same individual is then exposed to dengue of another serotype, he or she is far more vulnerable to the more fatal form of the disease. Which means that the ever-shifting tides of migration, both across and within national boundaries, compound the threat of DHF. Fresh blood -- from another country or another county -- may carry a dengue serotype that is not endemic to a given region, potentially triggering a DHF epidemic. Matamoros health authorities believe a recent localized DHF epidemic was generated in just this fashion.

In 1970 only one serotype, DEN-2, was present in the Americas. Back then the incidence of dengue in the Western Hemisphere was very low. This was the result of a military-style vector eradication program masterminded by the legendary Fred Soper, epidemiologist extraordinaire, who -- aided by a huge budget and the insecticide DDT, neither of which would be at his disposal today -- pursued the goal of mosquito extermination with airtight planning and discipline. But as the vector mosquito reinfested the Americas, slowly at first, then gaining steam in the 1990s, DEN-1, -4, and finally -3 emerged, setting the stage for dengue's vigorous return.

The dengue virus is carried by two species of mosquito: Aedes aegypti and Aedes albopictus. The geographical spread of these species overlaps to a degree, but their feeding and gestational proclivities don't have much in common. Ae. aegypti feeds voraciously on humans (only a fraction of the world's 3,500 species of mosquito prefers human blood to that of other animals) and favors warm, dark, enclosed spaces. Thus Ae. aegypti is an urban dweller, lurking in closets or under beds or behind curtains and feasting during daylight hours on a city's dense, contiguous clusters of Homo sapiens. It then repairs to any one of that city's infinite variety of ready-made breeding sites -- flower vases, washtubs, refrigerator pans, derelict automobiles -- to reproduce.

Ae. albopictus, the Asian tiger mosquito, first appeared in the Western Hemisphere in 1985, in Houston, most likely as a stowaway in shipments of used tires from Asia. It can tolerate colder temperatures; it breeds indoors and out but prefers suburban and rural settings, where it dines on both humans and animals; and it distinguishes itself by biting persistently and aggressively, also in the full light of day. Health officials are concerned about this species because its habitat range has spread rapidly, pushing the threat of disease ever northward.

For now, however, along the Texas-Mexico border, Ae. aegypti is more efficient in spreading the dengue pathogen. "This mosquito has adapted beautifully to our environment," Robles López said when we talked in his office. "Our winters are warmer, our rains more distributed throughout the year, our population denser. Aedes aegypti is happy."

This helps explain why scientists project that the incidence, range, and severity of infections will continue to increase over the coming decades. As temperatures rise, the habitat suitable for vector mosquitoes expands, as does the length of disease transmission seasons in temperate zones. Moreover, when it's hotter outside, the dengue virus replicates more rapidly in the mosquito. This increases the number of days on which it can distribute the disease during its three- or four-week life span. Higher temperatures also cause the mosquito to feed more vigorously. All these factors increase its capacity to disperse the virus.

The first step in the cycle of dengue transmission occurs when the vector mosquito bites an infected person. Next comes the "extrinsic" incubation period, the interval between uptake of the virus -- the bite -- and the point at which the virus matures enough in the mosquito to be transferrable to another person. Extrinsic incubation takes from 8 to 12 days, depending on ambient temperature. Now the infected mosquito bites again, transmitting the virus to its next human host. That brings us to the "intrinsic" incubation period, the time between the bite and the onset of symptoms. This can be anywhere from 3 to 14 days. The onset of symptoms corresponds to the "viremic" phase, meaning the virus is present in the blood and thus can be picked up and passed along by another bite from a vector mosquito. And so the sequence of transmission comes full circle.

"It's a nice thing about dengue," says Kay Tomashek, chief of epidemiology, dengue branch, in the CDC's division of vector-borne infectious diseases. "When a patient has a fever from dengue, you know that's the time to keep them away from mosquitoes, so they don't pass it on. In other viral diseases the viremic phase is not always so clear-cut." True enough, but since many dengue cases are asymptomatic, this knowledge is of limited use. Moreover, even when patients know they have the disease, only a lucky few have the luxury of shielding themselves from contact with mosquitoes.

Scientists hypothesize that the first human dengue infections crossed over from infected monkeys. In this sense dengue can be called zoonotic. But the pathogens and their transmission patterns evolve over time, and today there is no evidence that dengue infections cross the human/animal barrier. Humans now share it exclusively among themselves through the mosquito vector. Mary Hayden, a climate and disease expert with the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder, Colorado, explains it this way: "Humans are the only ones who mount enough viremia to infect mosquitoes. It certainly is possible that other species can get infected, but they are likely all dead-end hosts."

Yet it's hard to exaggerate the role zoonoses play in today's infectious disease trends. A full 75 percent of all new infectious diseases are coming to us through contact with animals or animal products, said Lonnie King, director of the CDC's National Center for Zoonotic, Vector-Borne, and Enteric Diseases (ZVED). This, King told me, is unprecedented. He attributed the shift to a "remarkable movement of people, animals, and pathogens" around the globe. ZVED, a cross-disciplinary team of a thousand scientists and related experts, was established in March 2007 in recognition of the unique challenge posed by this "convergence," as King put it, in which so many disease factors are in flux: climate and weather; ecosystems; land use; international travel, commerce, and migration patterns; human demographics and behavior; and social and economic inequity.

And then there are the genetic and biological ingredients of this twenty-first-century stew. Microbes adapt; humans become more susceptible to infection. Add all this together and it becomes clear that the task of health management reaches well beyond the confines of the doctor's office. "Rather than focusing exclusively on clinical illnesses," King told me, "we need to look at the whole picture. I don't care if you've got scales, skin, fur, or feathers; six legs, four legs, two, or none. We're all in this together."

At intervals of a mile or so, three bridges span the Rio Grande to connect Matamoros with Brownsville. The river here is low, narrow, and meandering, nothing grand about it as the flow disperses into a delta on its approach to the Gulf of Mexico. This is where General Zachary Taylor arrived with his forces in 1846 to assert the U.S. claim to territory then in dispute with Mexico. Taylor's men constructed an earthwork fort to help them withstand cannon fire coming in from Matamoros. In time more permanent structures replaced it, and the town of Brownsville sprang up nearby to service and supply the garrison. The fort's elegant brick and mortar structures, dating from 1868, are the hub of today's University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College. Its walls could tell the epic story of a long-ago fight with another mosquito-borne disease: yellow fever.

The loveliest and most imposing edifice in the complex is the hospital, now pressed into service as administrative offices. This is Gorgas Hall. It's easy to imagine its namesake, the dashing army doctor William Crawford Gorgas (known to some of the ladies of his day as Dr. Gorgeous), making his way briskly down the colonnaded breezeway at the height of the yellow fever epidemic in 1882. When Gorgas reported for duty, residents were panicked and corpses were piled high on an island in the middle of the river. Yellow fever, for which we now have a vaccine, is, like dengue, transmitted by Ae. aegypti. It is a hemorrhagic viral disease that, under epidemic conditions, results in organ failure and death in three-quarters of its victims. Back then no one knew what caused the virus, but over the course of his career Gorgas would help figure it out. In Havana, he worked with fellow army doctor Walter Reed and the Cuban physician Carlos Finlay to establish the link between mosquitoes and yellow fever. Later, as chief sanitary officer on the Panama Canal project, Gorgas took measures -- swamp drainage, fumigation, mosquito netting, public water systems -- that were key to limiting disease among workers, thus allowing the project to be completed. Eventually, in 1914, he became surgeon general of the army.

Today in Brownsville dengue fever does not generate the drama that yellow fever once did. Take the Brownsville Community Health Center, a large, full-service, federally funded operation. On the morning I visited, the center was buzzing with activity. The place exuded a friendly, competent efficiency as doctors and nurses processed waiting rooms full of low-income, mostly uninsured clients. Tuberculosis, diabetes, and complications from obesity top the list of ailments the center treats, though this spring it withstood an onslaught of H1N1 cases.

The clinic rarely checks patients for dengue. In 2008 it confirmed one case; in 2007, none. "The test costs $75 a pop and we have to send them out," I was told by executive director Paula Gomez. "It's expensive and time-consuming. We just can't afford it unless there's a compelling reason." When I asked if she thought they might be missing some cases, Gomez peered at me over her glasses: "We see many fevers of unknown origin, and we know the virus is out there. No doubt there's a gap." Indeed. A 2004 blood-sampling survey in Brownsville found evidence of undiagnosed past dengue infection in 40 percent of those tested. That's roughly half the rate discovered by the same test in Matamoros, but it's hardly reassuring.

In the poorer colonias of Matamoros, public services are rudimentary to nonexistent. On both sides of the border such unincorporated settlements may lack basic water and sewer systems, electricity, paved roads, trash removal, and so on. Each of these privations represents its own challenge to controlling mosquito infestation and disease. Without plumbing, open containers of standing water set aside for household use make ideal places for mosquitoes to breed. Without adequate drainage, rains cause serious flooding. Even as floods subside, water stands in the ruts and gulleys of unpaved roads and accumulates in mounds of uncollected garbage. Finally, without screened windows or adequate electricity, residents have no choice but to share their homes, and their flesh, with mosquitoes.

Generally, north of the border, "the amplification process [of dengue] is stymied," says Mary Hayden of the National Center for Atmospheric Research. By this she means that in the United States our standard of living reduces our exposure to mosquitoes and lessens the likelihood that people who are infected with an arbovirus will pass it along. Hayden, who has done extensive research in numerous dengue regions, including the Brownsville-Matamoros area, itemizes door and window screens, air-conditioning, and insect repellent as three key factors in protecting otherwise vulnerable communities from vector-borne infection. For the most part these things are standard issue on the U.S. side of the border, except in the poorest neighborhoods.

Which describes Brownsville. The Census Bureau's 2006 American Community Survey cited the city as the most impoverished in the nation. Its colonias have a history of negligible municipal services and transient populations. The Brownsville Health Department fields its own vector control teams. They set mosquito traps, apply larvicides, spray insecticides, and even mow lawns if it comes to that. (Ae. aegypti loves the dark, humid environment that is created when the grass grows high.) And Brownsville levies penalties for sanitation violations; it seems even the poorest U.S. city can extract fines from its citizens. In Matamoros such fines are on the books but rarely collected, medical services director Robles López told me, because local politicians fear it may cost them votes at election time.

Despite the protective effect of plumbing systems and screened windows throughout much of the United States, over the past decade dengue cases have been confirmed in almost every state and as far north as Maine, Minnesota, and Washington. These infections were very likely imported by travelers returning home from dengue-endemic areas, but as the vector moves into higher latitudes, the risk of locally acquired infection ticks up. And the recession isn't helping: budgets for mosquito control programs are being slashed nationwide. In addition to higher temperatures, the shifts in rainfall patterns that come with climate change will affect the picture too. Moreover, extreme weather events like storms and hurricanes, which are expected to increase, will not only cause flooding but may also interrupt the very services -- plumbing, electricity, sanitation -- that help insulate us from disease.

The only adornment on the wall of Robles López's office is a map of Matamoros labeled "Areas Inundables," or "Flood Zones." Festooned with color-coded pushpins showing areas of fresh or potential dengue outbreak and prioritizing locations that need attention from the mosquito control teams, it's a clear and simple piece of record keeping in a no-frills office. But health authorities along the border are harnessing technology in far more complex ways, as in the Web-based multimedia spatial-information system that documents Ae. aegypti breeding sites. The system was developed using a number of open software standards, so researchers can connect and overlay data from maps, remotely sensed images, plain text, graphs, photographs, and 360-degree panoramas.

Efforts are also under way to pool knowledge across national boundaries. "Not enough American physicians are trained to spot dengue," says Arturo Rodriguez, the Brownsville public health director. In a recent strategic planning session conducted by the Border Health Alliance under the auspices of the local binational health council (eight such councils operate along the Texas-Mexico border), dengue awareness was named one of the top five goals for the coming year. To that end, Rodriguez and his department are organizing a series of physician training workshops to educate Brownsville-area doctors on clinical detection of dengue symptoms and best practices for supportive care. Matamoros physicians, Rodriguez explained, are far ahead of their Brownsville counterparts in this regard. For one thing, they see more -- and more acutely ill -- dengue patients. But beyond that, testing is relatively cheap in Mexico, where overall health-care costs are lower than they are on the U.S. side.

The Brownsville campus of the U.T. School of Public Health plays an integral role in local disease surveillance. It operates a Biosafety Level 3 lab, a state-of-the-art facility that handles potentially lethal pathogens according to rigorous CDC-specified biocontainment standards. The lab was instrumental in identifying the H1N1 specimens sent over from the Brownsville Community Health Center this spring.

On a broader scale, the CDC has teamed with the Mexican Secretariat of Health to establish the Border Infectious Disease Surveillance project, known as BIDS. This was organized on the premise that binational collaboration is key to monitoring and containing infectious disease throughout the region. The project develops surveillance protocols, trains surveillance coordinators, establishes serologic testing sites at border labs, and crafts agreements for reporting and data sharing. Just this summer the CDC added dengue to its list of nationally notifiable infectious diseases, which subjects the pathogen to a more structured and verifiable surveillance program.

All of these efforts echo the kind of multidisciplinary, twenty-first-century public health infrastructure envisioned by the CDC's Howard Frumkin. His team recently launched the National Environmental Public Health Tracking Network, an online database that amalgamates health information from a cross-section of national, state, and municipal sources. "The world of health has to open up," said Frumkin's CDC colleague Lonnie King as he described a preemptive approach to controlling Rift Valley fever, a mosquito-borne scourge in Africa. Satellite images from NASA reveal when endemic areas are "greening up" -- that is, reaching a point of sufficient moisture from seasonal rains for the Rift Valley fever vector to start incubating. In this manner, carefully targeted interventions can be introduced before the disease blooms.

These are discrete pieces of a puzzle that is slowly coming together, and not all of the pieces are in focus. But the picture of health preparedness that's emerging represents a quantum leap over the old way of doing things. These new methods will weave together climate and weather data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; geographic and hydrological data from the U.S. Geological Survey; epidemiological and zoonoses data from the CDC and the World Health Organization; wildlife and veterinary data from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service; demographic data from immigration authorities and city agencies; and patient data from places like the Brownsville Community Health Center.

This overarching approach is what's needed to effectively mount a sustained global effort to track pathogens and environmental changes that affect all species. Grassroots efforts like those carried out by the Matamoros técnicos will always be crucial, and the more Maribel knows about restricting breeding sites and destroying larvae, the better. But only when an integrated health infrastructure finally takes shape will her burden truly be eased.

The Barbaric Heart

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

Look deep into what Curtis White calls "the Barbaric Heart" and you'll find yourself traveling, like some blood clot in a House episode, down the aisles of Wal-Mart and Costco, into the boardrooms of multinational corporations, along the streets of suburban sprawl, through alleyways of junkies and the homeless, to some dinner party where beautifully dressed people feel simultaneously empty and self-important. For English professor and social critic White, author of The Barbaric Heart: Faith, Money, and the Crisis of Nature, the Barbaric Heart is where we live today. We are slaves and masters (but mostly slaves) of the Market God of capitalism, a belief system that reduces all things-trees, animals, human creativity-to profit, where the only virtues are winning and accumulating.

At heart, The Barbaric Heart is a diatribe: grouchy, freewheeling, entertainingly laden with historical and cultural references, and sometimes quite funny. White argues that the Barbaric Heart is only one expression of being human and that the environmental crises we face today cannot be addressed strictly in economic terms. Turning to the arts and our spiritual traditions, we could instead live in a culture that prioritizes "thoughtfulness" and aesthetics rather than money and power and is "intent upon the beautiful as a social principle." By definition, a culture that values beauty would also value a healthy natural world.

According to White, it is not enough to tame or green the forces of capitalism. A Kyoto Protocol that bows to economic growth and development is just "whistling past the graveyard." The author is particularly scornful of environmentalists who adopt the language of economics, technology, and even good science to persuade the American public to stop treating nature as if it were one large convenience store. The Market God must be overturned.

Unfortunately, the author doesn't give many specifics as to how we can achieve this end. He suggests we begin with self-
reflection (questioning the assumptions of capitalism), read more poetry and philosophy, think seriously about our spiritual values and our relationship to Being (the joyous miracle of existence itself), engage personally in the creative arts, and work toward a public educational system that teaches our children a "deep literacy" as well as a deep ecology.

Like your favorite eccentric professor, White delivers some memorable lectures-on how today's capitalism has strayed from Adam Smith's original vision of a free market, for instance, and on the pantheism of the seventeenth-century philosopher Baruch Spinoza. Like that same professor, White can also seem obtusely impractical (even a flawed Kyoto Protocol seems better than none), deliberately provocative, and only occasionally humble. Most of the ideas are not original. (News flash: capitalism has no moral center!) Yet in these days of economic downturn, as our leaders rush to save the banking and automotive industries and encourage consumers to spend more and send the Dow ever upward, such an obvious caution still bears repeating.

Detroit Gets the Message

Molly Webster — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

At the Supreme Court, on Capitol Hill, and in state legislatures around the country, NRDC has spent years aggressively pushing auto manufacturers to increase the fuel efficiency of their vehicles and decrease emissions of greenhouse gas pollutants. So it was especially gratifying when, on May 22, President Barack Obama stood in the Rose Garden with a group of environmentalists, auto industry executives, and federal regulators to announce the establishment of strong greenhouse gas and fuel-efficiency standards for cars. This "historic agreement," the president declared, will "help America break its dependence on oil, reduce harmful pollution, and begin the transition to a clean-energy economy." On hand for the ceremony were the heads of General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler, all of whom have embraced the new rules, which will create greenhouse gas emission standards; these will be roughly equivalent to an increase in fuel efficiency to 35.5 miles per gallon. New car models will emit, on average, 30 percent less greenhouse gases than current models. Roland Hwang, NRDC's vehicle policy director, called the agreement "transformative."

It was a long and winding road that led to the Rose Garden. Key landmarks along the way included the Supreme Court's 2007 ruling that classified carbon dioxide as an air pollutant under the federal Clean Air Act (NRDC was a party to the suit), as well as the Environmental Protection Agency's recent determination that global warming pollution is indeed dangerous to human health and the environment. A shift in the economic climate also played a role, according to Hwang: two of the most recalcitrant auto companies, GM and Chrysler, discovered they had much less political leverage to fight greenhouse gas and higher fuel economy standards given their reliance on federal loans to stay in business.

After his day at the White House, David Doniger, NRDC's climate policy director, noted, "We'll have cleaner cars nationwide that meet California's landmark standards. We'll drive cars that save us money every time we fill up at the pump. And we'll help the auto industry get back to health by making cars that make sense in a world of higher oil prices and ever-growing concern about global warming."

The Crystal Palace

Richard Kenney — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Imagine, under the wonder-working icon
By the potted palm in the famous architect's

Solarium, a collection of silicon chips contains --
Besides meteorological models of the global CO2

Gradient plotted against rain forest incineration -- plans
For Joseph Paxton’s incredible Crystal Palace:

Crown of the age, apogee of Victorian nerve
And dream. It's 1854: its soaring nave

Contains 300,000 hand-cut panes! -- containing:
Cogs; gears; engineering grandeurs; continent-

Spanners, their pressure-gauges outgassing; Gondwanan
Fauna never before seen on earth; a one-

Hundred-and-eight-foot elm swathed in a steam sarong,
And a watchwork orrery containing heaven wrong.

A New Climate for Literature

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

As a so-called nature writer, I've learned that there are certain expectations that go with the job. I should prance ecstatically through the daisies. I should explain the biology of certain plants and animals. And, on occasion, I should don the robes of a prophet and declaim upon the end of the world. Unfortunately it's not something I am particularly good at or comfortable doing. The robes seem pretentious to me, and itchy. Lately when I give talks, I can't help feeling that the audience wants something more from me, that they're waiting for me to stop waxing poetic about birds and start intoning the phrase "global warming" over and over.

But I have other ideas, impure and pesky ideas that keep me from being a model standard-bearer for the Movement. For instance, sometimes I think that, from a writer's point of view, the end of the world might be kind of interesting. I don't mean to sound glib. I have thought hard about what it means that my daughter will grow up in a crowded, overheated world into which we pour CO2 and from which species daily go extinct. But as a writer, I am faced with a dilemma: How do I incorporate this knowledge into my work without coming off as a mere doomsayer or an angry ranter?

The short answer, I think, involves art. These days, bookstores are jammed with volumes that sound like they resulted from a brainstorming session between a modern marketer and an Old Testament prophet, with catastrophic titles beginning The End of..., The Death of..., or The Last.... Their authors, like Jeremiah before them, issue stern warnings about human behavior and how it is hastening the world's end -- unless, perhaps, we can change our behavior enough to save ourselves. The obvious danger of the genre is shrillness. No one wants to live with a spouse who feels the need to scream, several times a day, "This marriage is over! We are doomed!"

The best nonfiction combats this tendency with good sense and good writing. Rachel Carson's lyric calm on the pages of Silent Spring, and her professional composure while testifying before Congress, belied the efforts of chemical companies to smear her as a hysteric, a Communist sympathizer, and -- worst of all! -- a spinster. The title of Bill McKibben's The End of Nature suggests the work of a grim lecturer, but this early account of global warming, published almost 20 years before An Inconvenient Truth, piled on the facts and warnings with a sure journalistic hand. Of course this countertone can be overdone: Al Gore's film, for all its effectiveness, sometimes comes on like your dull Uncle Harry hijacking the living room with his slides from Fiji.

Human beings are better at focusing on the end of dinner than on the end of the world, and I think that part of the nonfiction writer's art is to meld the apocalyptic with the day-to-day, to simultaneously sound notes of common sense and the greater peril. For my money, no one does this better than the essayist Wendell Berry. Every environmental writer of worth has been called "the modern Thoreau," but Berry earns the title. In dozens of books, including Re-collected Essays and Another Turn of the Crank, he reveals how the environmental crisis is actually a crisis of character, and does so with a tone that is at once confident, homey, and ministerial yet short of scolding. If I am going to be told by anyone that the world is doomed, let it be Berry.

Dealing with the end of the world gets a little trickier in fiction and drama. While nonfiction can get away with being didactic, novels and plays usually can't. I admire writers like Barbara Kingsolver and T. C. Boyle, who have written about topics that might seem, in synopsis, plainly environmental, but have addressed them with humor, energy, and craft. Boyle's short story "Top of the Food Chain" tackles the timeworn topic of DDT's devastating effect on the food web, but does so entertainingly through the voice of a bumbling and optimistic scientist who, after wreaking havoc on the ecosystems of Borneo, insists that "the people were happier, I think, in the long run...."

The future of environmental disaster is inherently speculative -- What will life be like if the seas rise? What if the planet overheats or freezes? -- which makes it an ideal subject for science fiction. "As a tool set for illuminating various aspects of our present and questions about our future, I find science fiction is my perfect home," says Paolo Bacigalupi, one of the genre's best and brightest young practitioners. Bacigalupi admits to being an avid reader of environmental journalism. It's part of his working method: he takes the facts of the present and runs with them, usually straight toward an ugly future. In his first book, Pump Six and Other Stories, he creates searing futurescapes of an overheated, environmentally degraded earth jammed full of starving humans, genetically engineered crops and animals, and half-human creatures, all doing their best to scrounge out a life. One story features a group of genetically altered miners who eat mine tailings for supper. They discover a dog -- an animal they have seen before only in a zoo -- out in the slag fields and adopt it for a while. It provides some unexpected pleasures, like licking their faces, that their technology can't offer, but not enough to keep them from growing tired of the creature and, ultimately, eating it. We emerge from this dystopian vision happy to be back in our own world, and maybe a little less inclined to flip on the air conditioner.

With global warming now such a part of our consciousness, it seems only a matter of time before it becomes a greater part of our art. At the moment, two interlinked plays by Steve Waters, On the Beach and Resilience, tackle issues of climate change on the London stage.

The review in the Daily Telegraph concedes that the concept may sound "too worthy for words." But the stories that drive the plays -- battles involving a son and father, both glaciologists, and a group of government ministers as storms rage and seas rise outside -- work "superbly as gripping drama," assures Charles Spencer, the Telegraph's chief theater critic. "We learn a great deal about global warming without feeling harangued." Which is the whole point, of course. We don't go to King Lear to learn about the etiquette of royal succession. If environmental writing is to succeed as art, it can't be Environmental Art; any "teaching" or "learning" had better be incidental.

If London is too far to go, don't worry: the apocalypse will be coming soon to a multiplex near you. Cormac McCarthy's The Road, which brought doom to the best-seller lists a couple years ago, is set to be released as a film in October. I recently reread McCarthy's beautiful, almost unrelentingly grim book and, on finishing the last sentence, felt powerfully warned in a way that I hadn't been by An Inconvenient Truth. Gore's slide show certainly both scared the bejesus out of me and got me thinking. But stories can go to places that statistics cannot. As a kind of coda to The Road, after presenting 286 pages of an ashen, almost hopeless world, McCarthy remembers the world before, with its brook trout that "smelled of moss in your hand" and whose scaled backs glistened with "vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming." These maps, McCarthy writes, were of "a thing which could not be put back." That last phrase crushed me. I felt a surge of deep remorse and realized again just how miraculous is this world that we seem set on destroying.

Some environmentally minded friends would say that a surge of emotion like the one I experienced means nothing unless it is followed immediately by political action. I'm not so sure. A Marxist poet once accosted Robert Frost: "No poetry is worth its name unless it moves people to action." Frost replied, "I agree. The question is, how soon?" Art has its own province; the transformations it seeks, though perhaps less rapid and obvious, are no less vital. While we need all the nonfiction books of warning we can get, even if their titles do start with The End... or The Last..., we also need, as the planet warms, a literature that makes deeper sense of the warming. We all indeed may be doomed, but for those of us who write sentences for a living, there will still be work to do, to make our words match the changing world. Those few who do it well will make the rest of us feel our losses that much more keenly, and in a manner that no slogans or statistics can ever match.

A Better Mars Bar

Jennifer Weeks — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Chocophiles, rejoice! You may now look forward to a day when scarfing down a Mars bar comes with slightly less guilt.

Earlier this year, the candy bar's eponymous manufacturer, which also produces M&Ms, Snickers, Milky Way, and other chocolate delights, inked a deal with the Rainforest Alliance, promising that all of its cocoa purchases would be certified as sustainably grown by the year 2020. Next year the company's Galaxy bar, a big hit across the pond, will be similarly certified by the alliance. This will allow the confectioner to keep pace with Cadbury, which has shifted to sustainable suppliers for its Dairy Milk bars.

"It's rocking Candyland," says Chris Wille, chief of sustainable agriculture for the alliance, who explains that this is no small endeavor. All of the world's cocoa is grown in the tropics, in places like Ghana, the Ivory Coast, and Ecuador, where poor farmers raze rainforest to plant cocoa trees. Without the shade of the forest canopy, the temperature and erosion rate rise while water becomes scarce. Sustainable cocoa farms leave forests intact, improving growing conditions and preserving habitat and biodiversity.

Letters from Our Readers: Fall 2009

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

People vs. the Planet

Your article "India, Enlightened," by George Black (Summer 2009), on how to save India's poor without environmental collapse, ignored the obvious solution: limit population growth. China's one-child policy has received condemnation from the United States and other democratic countries, but China may prove to be the only large, populous country to achieve sustainability. The same objective can be reached by democratic means. An average family size below replacement level (two children or fewer) could be achieved by promoting public awareness via advertising and by tax incentives or monetary rewards. The offer of a retirement income to those with two or fewer children could reduce or eliminate the perceived need to bear many children as a means of retirement security.

posted online by Don Gentry

The Indian authorities should focus on the immense potential of the commercial exploitation of cow dung. India has the world's largest population of cattle. If utilized intelligently, it can provide gobar gas to substantially reduce the shortage of electricity and also provide sufficient biofertilizer to avoid the use of soil-destroying chemical fertilizers that use up fresh water resources and result in deforestation and siltation of rivers, leading to annual floods.

posted online by Purnima L. Toolsidass

Life with Parkinson's

My wife has suffered from Parkinson's disease for 31 years. As her primary caregiver, I was surprised and pleased to see Robin Marantz Henig's article, "Parkinson's: The Pesticide Link" (Summer 2009), on the possible connection between the disease and chemicals in the environment. I was not so pleased to find that the article presents what appears to be some misinformation. The author states, "Cognitive skills usually are not affected." However, there is a growing consensus that cognitive impairment does take place more often than not, typically from the time of initial diagnosis and eventually evolving into what is known as Parkinson's dementia, characterized by such psychotic symptoms as paranoid delusions. But thanks to Henig for throwing a necessary spotlight on this terrible affliction.

posted online by Kenneth Goodrich

In her article on the link between Parkinson's disease and pesticides, Robin Marantz Henig states that the Chamorro people of the Pacific island of Guam developed Parkinson's-like symptoms after consuming rodents known as fruit bats that had bioaccumulated the neurotoxin BMAA from cycads. While fruit bats are indeed consumed by some Pacific islanders, they are not rodents. All bats belong to the order Chiroptera (Latin for "hand wing"), the second-most speciose order of mammals, with more than 1,100 currently recognized species. They are the only mammals capable of true flight and are phylogenetically more related to humans than to rodents. For those interested, Oliver Sacks, in his 1996 book, The Island of the Color Blind, recounts the fascinating tale of the Chamorros and their mysterious suite of neurological symptoms.

Lizabeth Southworth; Newburyport, Massachusetts

The editors respond: We regret the error, which was noted by many of our astute readers.

School Lunch Menu

It is great that Ann Cooper, who was profiled in "Serving Suggestion," by Karen Solomon (Summer 2009), is publicizing -- and profiting from -- the need for schools to provide healthier meal options, but calories are calories, at home or at school. With schools cutting back on physical education and parents neglecting to send kids out to play and explore, exercise is what is really missing in the recipe. And whatever happened to the low-cost bag lunch with PB&J on whole wheat, carrot and celery sticks, apple, oatmeal cookie, and milk money? Not "cool"?

posted online by Ron Blackmore

Write to Us

Got an opinion? Send in your thoughts by pen or by keyboard. Visit us on the Web at onearth.org. Letters may be edited for clarity and length.

Power Up That Tree

Sarah Parsons — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Some homeowners find solar panels on the roof less than beautiful. Wouldn't it be nice, then, if you could get your renewable energy from something with greater aesthetic appeal? U.K.-based company SolarBotanic is designing artificial trees, shrubs, and flowers with "nanoleaves" that can harvest energy from the sun's heat and light, the leaves' movement, even the pressure of falling raindrops. SolarBotanic's chief visualization officer, Alex van der Beek, says that once the trees are fully developed, they could be installed in backyards for home energy use or even planted along highways to help power electric and hydrogen vehicles. But don't expect to create a lush, solar garden anytime soon -- unfortunately the pilot trees won't be ready for another year, with commercial production even farther down the road.

NRDC: The Bear Minimum

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

Based in Livingston, Montana, Louisa Willcox is NRDC's senior wildlife advocate and resident grizzly bear expert. OnEarth asked her about the threats facing American grizzlies.

Rick Bass reports that only about 25 brown bears remain in the Pyrenees. How does that compare to the situation of grizzly bears in this country?

Grizzlies in the Selkirks and Cabinet-Yaak ecosystems in Idaho and Montana are in a predicament that is quite similar to the bears Rick Bass sought in the Pyrenees. Each group has about 20 to 40 bears, and each is teetering on the edge of extinction. The reasons are similar, too: habitat loss and excessive human-caused mortality. The Selkirks and Cabinet-Yaak grizzlies are among the last five populations in the lower 48 states, which amount to just one percent of the number in the West 200 years ago. Exacerbating this problem of small numbers is the isolation of these groups from one another, which threatens their genetic health.

What are the main threats right now to the grizzlies in the Northern Rockies?

Bears are threatened by habitat loss and excessive human-caused mortality. Of particular concern are rural sprawl, energy development and associated transmission lines, as well as two new mine proposals. With the lowest reproductive rate of any mammal in North American, the grizzly bear is especially vulnerable to humans. Human-caused mortality rates are unsustainably high in all of the Northern Rockies populations.

NRDC is heavily involved in the loss of whitebark pine forests. Why is the tree so important to the Yellowstone grizzly, and what is happening to it?

Although grizzlies eat a variety of foods, from grass to buffalo, whitebark pine seeds are the engine that drives the health of the Yellowstone grizzly bear population. Whitebark pine forests are collapsing throughout the region, as a result of a non-native pathogen, white pine blister rust, as well as an unprecedented outbreak of mountain pine beetles, which are able to flourish in these high-elevation forests as a result of warming temperatures. NRDC is collaborating with the U.S. Forest Service and others on the first-ever comprehensive aerial assessment of whitebark pine health in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem: the picture is grim, and whitebark pine is functionally gone in much of the Greater Yellowstone.

Why do bears matter?

Because of their sensitivity to development and huge home ranges (200-400 square miles), grizzly bears serve as the barometer of the health of the ecosystems where they live. When grizzly bear populations are healthy, so are other wildlife species, from big game to birds.

What is the status of grizzly bears in the lower 48 states?

Only five grizzly bear populations remain in the lower 48 states, which is just one percent of the number that were here just 200 years ago. The five populations are in the Yellowstone, Glacier, Cabinet-Yaak, Selkirks, and North Cascades ecosystems. With the exception of the Yellowstone population, grizzlies in the lower 48 states are protected under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Experts maintain that the grizzly bear would have disappeared in the lower 48 states but for the protections of the ESA. Yellowstone's bears were removed from the endangered species list in 2007, and NRDC is challenging thar decision in court.

Climbing the Walls

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

Unlikely as it may seem, this "vertical garden" on a highway overpass in Aix en Provence, France, is the work of a serious scientist. Patrick Blanc is a biologist at the prestigious, government-funded Centre National de Recherche Scientifique, and regards his walls as something of a sideline -- even though they now adorn buildings around the world from Madrid to Bangkok. Blanc's plantings specialize in striking juxtapositions of texture and color: bold tropical elephant ears jammed next to dense clusters of hostas of every conceivable shade; bright spikes of creeping bentgrass peeping out from a drapery of ferns. People may say that it's overused these days, but there are times when "green" is the only word that will do.

NRDC: Climate and Disease

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

OnEarth spoke to Kim Knowlton, a senior scientist with NRDC's health and environment program and co-author, with Gina Solomon and Miriam Rotkin-Ellman, of Fever Pitch, a July 2009 report on the spread of dengue fever in the Americas.

What are the main risk factors we should be aware of in our everyday lives?

International travel is one area of concern. More than 63 million Americans traveled abroad in 2008. So infectious diseases can move more rapidly into new, non-immune populations. Also, as our increasingly diverse American population visits friends and family back home with greater frequency, it increases the possibility of people returning to the United States acutely ill.

So what can people do to protect themselves against dengue when they travel?

The single best thing you can do is arm yourself with information before you leave. If dengue outbreaks are a threat in the country you're visiting, stay in screened or air-conditioned places, wear insect repellent with 20 percent to 30 percent DEET, and wear pants and loose, long sleeves if you're out in the morning or early evening, when dengue mosquitoes most like to bite. If you develop a fever within two weeks of returning home, see a doctor and tell him or her where you've been.

What would NRDC like to see in the way of public health planning to help deal with the threat of dengue?

We'd like to see a coordinated strategy involving stronger monitoring, surveillance, and mosquito control; creating disease- and climate-resilient communities; improved travel information; and legislation to reduce global warming pollution. Steps like these for dengue fever fit into an overall, multidisciplinary capacity to predict, plan for, and respond to emerging infectious disease risks right now, as well as in the future. And NRDC will continue to be a strong advocate for better climate-health preparedness.

Why don't you walk us through each element of that strategy in greater detail?

Improve environmental monitoring.
Mosquito trapping, geographic information systems (GIS) mapping, and remote-sensing tools can help detect and track the occurrence and spread of dengue's vector species, their habitat areas, and the presence of the dengue virus in mosquitoes. Ongoing research is needed because global warming's effects on temperature and rainfall patterns can affect the risks of dengue outbreaks differently in specific areas.
Support for stronger health surveillance.
Dengue should be made a nationally notifiable disease throughout the United States. A surveillance system should be established for collection and timely virologic testing and analysis of blood samples from suspected dengue cases. Consistent, centrally reported and confirmed dengue case surveillance data -- with enhanced international coordination, data sharing, lab capacity, and outbreak notification among nations like the United States and Mexico who share border communities -- are needed to better understand the changing incidence of the disease and evaluate control programs.
Improve mosquito control.
Pest management that targets larval mosquito reduction should be implemented at a community level. Emptying, cleaning, treating, or removing stagnant water containers -- including waste tires -- is an important step that will help prevent transmission of dengue, as well as other diseases such as West Nile virus. After storms, floods, and hurricanes, federal assistance for emergency vector surveillance and control should be made available immediately to affected localities.
Improve infrastructure to help create climate- and disease-resilient homes and communities.
Government programs to upgrade housing and municipal services will help reduce community vulnerability to dengue. Intact window and door screens, for example, can significantly reduce the transmission of mosquito-borne disease. Access to dependable piped water and trash collection will further reduce mosquito breeding habitat and improve the overall health status of community residents. When storms, hurricanes or floods damage homes, timely response efforts can help reduce infectious disease risks.
Reduce global warming pollution to decrease the extent and severity of warming.
Because climate change may expand the geographic range of dengue's vectors, addressing global warming at its source could help limit dengue and other climate-health risks. Governments should enact mandatory legislation to reduce global warming pollution and combat climate change, and protect communities from the impacts of climate change already underway.
Get information to travelers visiting high-risk dengue areas.
The CDC has estimated that as many as 1 in 1,000 travelers to dengue-endemic countries become ill. Better education of travelers -- as well as clinicians and health departments -- is essential to help recognize dengue infections and treat them immediately.

Spotlight: American Power

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

In 2003 the photographer Mitch Epstein embarked on what he calls "a strange kind of tourism: energy tourism." His aim was to document, with his large-format camera, the countless sites of energy production in the United States and the ways in which energy is consumed, as well as the costs of those endeavors to society and the natural world. In American Power, his lens captures the unsettling tranquility of a green backyard in West Virginia, over which loom the cooling stacks of a coal-fired power plant. Hoover Dam, once an emblem of our mastery over nature, has become, with its "bathtub ring" around sinking Lake Mead, a witness to depletion. Epstein was particularly affected by his time photographing the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, including a ravaged yard in Biloxi, Mississippi (above). As an indirect consequence of global warming, he writes, "Katrina was the ultimate symbol of how we, as a society, had failed; how our rapacious, ‘supersize-me' culture had led to catastrophe." While Epstein's liner notes are strongly worded, the images themselves-measured, with subtle lines and subdued colors-speak volumes with their understatement. Their final effect is almost elegiac: a dignified tribute to our country's vast power and to the landscape it is quietly corroding.

OnEarth Magazine Articles

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Resurrecting a River

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Just Food

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NRDC: Combining New and Old

Happy Birthday to Us - 30 Years and Counting

Africa on the Auction Block

NRDC in the News: Fall 2009

Q & A: The Big Dig

A Dream of Bears

Google My CO2

The New Diseases on Our Doorstep

The Barbaric Heart

Detroit Gets the Message

The Crystal Palace

A New Climate for Literature

A Better Mars Bar

Letters from Our Readers: Fall 2009

Power Up That Tree

NRDC: The Bear Minimum

Climbing the Walls

NRDC: Climate and Disease

Improve environmental monitoring.

Support for stronger health surveillance.

Improve mosquito control.

Improve infrastructure to help create climate- and disease-resilient homes and communities.

Reduce global warming pollution to decrease the extent and severity of warming.

Get information to travelers visiting high-risk dengue areas.

Spotlight: American Power