OnEarth.org

Q&A: Carol Browner, Director of the White House Office of Energy and Climate Change Policy

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

This is a special online preview of a story appearing in the Spring 2010 issue of OnEarth. Subscribe here to receive our magazine.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Any estimates on numbers?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So no regrets?

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

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

Getting Congress to pass comprehensive energy legislation.

Fishing for Pollution on the Bronx River

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

Citizen Science: Part of an ongoing series about everyday people adding to our knowledge of the world around us.

Tori Swedin cuts the motor on her dinghy. Aside from a few mallards perched near the water's edge, New York City's Bronx River is empty this afternoon. It's quiet as Swedin leans over the side of the boat and dips her French-tipped nails into the murk. She fills a series of tubes and glass vials, then hands them to her mentor, Addy Guance.

Their water thermometer reads 52 degrees Fahrenheit, but neither Swedin nor Guance look cold. They're bundled into thick tops and wearing work boots, with life jackets adding an extra layer of insulation. Swedin works quickly, though, collecting water samples that will be used to measure oxygen levels and sediment suspended near the river's surface.

At 19, Swedin (in photo, right) is a program assistant and one of Guance's former students at Rocking the Boat, a nonprofit environmental group. It's located in Hunts Point, an industrial section of the South Bronx. Unemployment in the neighborhood is rampant, the crime rate is among the highest in New York, and more than half the population lives below the poverty line.

In Hunts Point, you won't find many kids going fishing or skipping stones after school -- most of the waterfront property here belongs to expressways, commuter rails, and waste transfer stations. Many of the students at Rocking the Boat barely knew the river existed until they signed up for the program, which conducts workshops for local teens, teaching them to row, build boats, and study the river's ecology. Guance has been the group's on-the-water instructor for 10 years.

But this backyard ecology program does more than just provide an after-school educational experience. It's a way to keep track of the health of the river itself -- and through that, the health of the community and the entire city. The readings that Swedin and her mentor take this afternoon will go to the Bronx River Alliance, which has kept records on the condition of the river since 2001. The students at Rocking the Boat collect samples twice a week, and if they find anything fishy -- a strange smell or sheen or a toxin in the water -- the alliance will report it to the city's parks department or various environmental agencies.

As collectors of pollution, rivers are among the best barometers of the environmental health of a city -- or the countryside, for that matter. The charts kept by the Bronx teens at Rocking the Boat show evidence of waste from the cement factories and sewage treatment plants that line the riverbanks. But as the students are discovering, refuse also flows into the river from street grates far across town. As in nearly 800 other municipalities across the country, New York City's rainwater runoff, household sewage, and industrial wastewater all run through the same pipes. And in a city as dense as New York, it only takes a tenth of an inch of rainfall for these pipes to back up and spew their grimy load directly into local waterways.

The result is more than 27 billion gallons of raw sewage and polluted storm water pouring into New York Harbor each year, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Under the Clean Water Act (the federal law that governs pollution in our streams, lakes and estuaries), cities and towns with combined sewer systems are required to report overflows. But the law doesn't require them to seek out and find these discharges, says Nancy Stoner, a former co-director of NRDC's water program who is now the deputy assistant administrator for water at the Environmental Protection Agency. As a result, officials tend to ignore the problem, Stoner says, rather than investing in monitoring systems that would detect water pollution.

New York City officials have estimated that it would take a minimum of $58 billion to prevent routine sewage overflows -- money they don't have. But as programs such as Rocking the Boat proliferate across the country, giving average citizens a glimpse at what's going on in their waterways, cities are starting to feel more pressure to do something. A recent New York Times series on widespread drinking water pollution, which has been documented by government agencies but allowed to continue without penalty, is leading to questions on Capitol Hill and elsewhere about the need for tougher enforcement of clean water laws.

It's not that hard to find problems if you look for them. On this particular day on the Bronx River, Guance and Swedin are seeking signs of an oil spill that took place about 12 miles upstream. In the early morning on November 4, a Con Edison power station in the Dunwoodie section of Yonkers went up in flames. The fire consumed a tank containing 30,000 gallons of transformer fluid, a mineral oil used for electrical insulation and cooling.

About half of the oil either burned up in the fire or bled into the Bronx River via storm sewers, says Thomas Panzone, a spokesman for the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation. A cleanup crew from Con Edison then spent three weeks working on the river, sopping up residual oil and raking up contaminated leaves floating on the surface. Panzone estimated that the oil had traveled about seven miles downstream.

But Guance worries that the spill made it farther than that, into her territory. Shortly after she heard about it, a herring washed ashore in Hunts Point. Guance wondered if the spill was to blame. "It could have just been me speculating, but it's a little too coincidental," she says.

Out on the boat, while Swedin collects the water samples, Guance picks up her clipboard and starts recording the day's data. "Weather, dense cloud cover. Algal blooms -- do you see any algal blooms?"

Swedin shakes her head no. An algal bloom could be a sign of contamination, sometimes a result of run-off that raises the river's nitrate levels, which in turn feeds an overgrowth of algae.

"Sometimes you can see it with your eyes, some sticky stuff coming out of the water," Guance says. It happened just last summer, she adds, when a brown tide washed over the river and the oxygen levels collapsed a short distance from a fertilizer plant in Hunts Point.

Although Guance, 31, can recall plenty of algal blooms and pH spikes in her decade with Rocking the Boat, she says the Bronx River has come a long way. Since 2001, groups like hers have pulled auto parts and appliances out of the river by the tens of thousands. They've turned an old concrete plant into a park, successfully introduced a school of herring into the river, and created colonies of filter-feeding oysters along the banks to help clean out the toxins.

"I remember having to dodge cars," Guance says, referring to the junked autos that used to block her way as she paddled downstream. "And washing machines and stoves."

Today in Hunts Point, Guance's figures are checking out OK. The pH meter reads 7.6 -- just slightly basic. The river's plants and fish are still breathing. The oil spill hasn't done the kind of damage that she feared.

"It's a little hard to swallow sometimes," Guance says. "For something like that to happen, you're taking three steps forward and two steps back."

But Linda Cox, executive director of the Bronx River Alliance, says just the fact that more people are aware of the river and looking out for pollution represents major progress.

"The more eyes on the river, the better," she says. "It helps us build up a sense of what's happening over time. Things flow to rivers. They'll show you the evidence of where mistakes have happened."

Though Guance is modest about her role, Cox says it is people like her, with her test tubes and her bi-weekly boat rides, who are keeping watch on the polluters upstream and helping to reclaim the river as part of their community.

Out on the water, a call comes over the radio. Guance holds it to her ear and listens to the voice over the speaker. "There's a tug coming towards us," she says, and points a finger south. "We need to get back."

Swedin starts the dinghy's motor and turns upstream.

Read more stories in the Citizen Science series.

Big Apple Needs Bees, Supporters Say

Mary Plummer — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Andrew Coté tried to sweeten the deal while extolling the virtues of beekeeping to a somber-faced Department of Health panel on Wednesday. He presented a small jar of golden honey from his hives in Manhattan and Brooklyn.

Technically, he was offering them contraband material. Beekeeping is illegal in New York City -- the result of a change to the city health code enacted in the 1990s, when honey bees were added to a list of prohibited animals such as lions, pit vipers and crocodiles.

Coté and about a dozen other beekeepers asked the health board on Wednesday to overturn that rule and allow beekeeping in the city again, without the risk of fines.

"I think some sweetness in our life is appropriate," said Coté, a founding member of the New York City Beekeepers Association.

Under the proposed change, which was introduced in December, hives would be legal but need to be registered. The Board of Health is expected to review today's public comments and make a decision in March.

No one spoke against legalizing bees.

Supporters pointed out that bees help pollinate plants and flowers, contributing to healthy harvests. They also touted beekeeping as a rewarding and educational hobby that teaches everything from patience to environmental responsibility.

"The bees bring so many good things," said Everett Scott, an Upper West Side resident who keeps bees out of state and would like to do it in the city. "Urban beekeeping offers a wonderful way to engage in a dynamic relationship with nature."

Under the current rules, bees are labeled by the health department as "naturally inclined to do harm." People keeping bees can be fined $200 to $2,000 per violation. The health department has received 164 bee and wasp complaints since the beginning of 2009.

But beekeepers say honey bees aren't aggressors like wasps and hornets.

"Unless you go up to a beehive and really shake it and disturb it, honey bees are really not out to sting you," said Nadia Johnson, a program coordinator at the nonprofit organization Just Food.

Today's hearing follows a growing interest in New York City beekeeping, which peaked last year with a flurry of media coverage when a bill to eliminate the bee ban was introduced in the city council. When the bill went nowhere, activists turned to the city health department to change the code.

Despite current laws, beekeeping has been taking place in hives hidden on rooftops across the city. Several groups teach classes on urban beekeeping, and some members sell honey produced with illegal bees at neighborhood farmers markets.

Still, the law discourages some people who would like to take up the hobby. Anna Bridge has wanted to start a beehive since 2004 but has held off because it's illegal.

"I've had to live vicariously through the bees of others," she said.

Beekeeper Grai Rice called today a big step forward. She has been working to help legalize beekeeping for years.

"I feel like we're at that point where it's going to be made legal," said Rice, adding that she sees beekeeping as a vital step in New York City's environmental goals. "It's this incredible, exciting moment that we really can be a green city."

Obama Budget Plan a Mixed Bag for Environment

Osha Gray Davidson and Emily Gertz — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

The Obama administration's 2011 budget plan, released this week, includes a lot of things that have the potential to help the environment: more investments in renewable energy (including solar, wind and energy efficiency), some reduction in spending on fossil fuels, and backing for wilderness protection, clean air and water, greenhouse gas regulations and green jobs.

The drawbacks, some environmentalists say, include new loan guarantees for the nuclear power industry (with plans to support seven to 10 new nuclear plants), opportunities for more offshore oil and gas drilling, a lack of focus on endangered species protection, and the continuing imbalance between what traditional energy sources and renewable sources would receive.

"With this budget, President Obama is starting to usher in a clean energy economy," said Wesley Warren, director of programs at the Natural Resources Defense Council. "Now it's up to Congress to deliver on the president's funding priorities for a cleaner, more secure America."

In a statement, however, Warren raised concerns about the president's proposal for additional loan guarantees to the nuclear power industry, calling them a "mistake."

"This is a mature industry that generates high-cost, non-renewable energy and dangerous waste," Warren said. "It should not receive additional taxpayer subsidies."

The marine conservation group Oceana said in a statement that it "applauds the Administration's effort to level the playing field for clean sources of energy and to save taxpayers money by cutting tax preferences for dirty fossil fuels," but added: "Expanding offshore drilling for oil and gas would further contribute to the release of harmful greenhouse gas emissions and compromise our clean energy future."

Here's a look at the proposed budgets of some key departments and agencies and what their plans could mean for Americans and the environment:

DOE: Support for clean energy, but also for nukes, coal

The proposed $28.4 billion Department of Energy budget targets several projects designed to help "green the economy," including $2.4 billion slated for energy efficiency and renewable energy research and development. Solar power gets the largest share of this R&D money ($300 million), followed by wind power ($123 million) and geothermal ($55 million).

Those numbers please renewable energy advocates such as Rhone Resch, head of the Solar Energy Industries Association, who predicted that the 22 percent increase in solar funding "will expand the industry's ability to advance technologies that will create jobs and economic opportunities."

The amount, however, is still well short of the $1.4 billion that the Carter administration spent in 1981 on a program to make the United States the world leader in solar power.

Many environmentalists are concerned by the administration's plans to boost funding for nuclear power. Energy Secretary Steven Chu explained that the nearly $1 billion slated for nuclear R&D is needed to "restart the nuclear power industry in the United States" -- a goal not shared by many clean energy advocates.

Although DOE's budget eliminates $2.7 billion in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry, it also supports coal-burning power plants by calling for $500 million in research on what some call "clean coal technologies."

Interior: Solar projects, offshore wind -- where's species protection?

Interior Secretary Ken Salazar's $12 billion budget put jobs, energy security, and climate change in the foreground, with some twists to emphasize the department's breaks with Bush administration practices.

Salazar gave clean energy programs the biggest push at the budget rollout yesterday. Interior's budget request includes $73 million for renewable energy programs, including the assessment of potential sites for 5,000 miles of new transmission lines.

The department also hopes to expedite the review of 220 applications for utility-scale solar power projects in the West. By the end of 2011, Salazar hopes to have issued permits for renewable power plants capable of generating 9,000 megawatts of electricity -- the equivalent to 25 major coal-fired power plants, the secretary said.

Interior is asking for $73.3 million for its renewable energy development programs, which is $14.2 million above 2010 levels. A considerable percentage of that funding -- $34.9 million -- would go to the Minerals Management Service, which oversees development of offshore wind power on the Outer Continental Shelf. The remainder is split between four other agencies within Interior, including $7 million tagged to assessing the impacts of renewable energy development on wildlife.

There is also $71 million in the department's budget for research on climate change. The funds would be used to determine which areas of the country and which species of plants and animals are most at risk from changing weather patterns.

One area of disappointment for many environmentalists: there were few specifics on Interior's plans for wildlife protection under the Endangered Species Act, even though eight years of neglect under the Bush administration has left many species with little or no protected habitat.

"It's good to hear they've recognized that assessing the impacts of renewable energy on wildlife is important," said Noah Greenwald with the nonprofit Center for Biological Diversity. "(But) it sounds like in the budget there is not much mention of listing of species, or the listing program at all, even though there are 259 species that are candidates for protection right now."

EPA: Funds for protecting health, air, water

The 2011 budget request for the Environmental Protection Agency is down 5 percent from last year's record $10.5 billion, but Administrator Lisa Jackson reminded critics yesterday that the Obama administration increased funding for the agency by nearly 30 percent in its first year. (That doesn't include an extra $7 billion allocated to programs under the EPA's purview in last year's economic recovery act.)

Scott Brown with the Environmental Council of the States (ECOS) says that although the 2011 budget isn't perfect, "it's such a huge improvement that I don't feel compelled to do an alternative budget for the first time in five years."

The budget includes funding to address a variety of health concerns that have been neglected in previous administrations. These include studies of endocrine disruptors and the effects of hydraulic fracturing -- a technique used to release underground pockets of natural gas -- and to clean up polluted brownfields, particularly in underserved and economic disadvantaged areas.

"There is no moving away from a greener, more sustainable economy," Jackson said. "The president has made that clear, and the work EPA does is the backbone of that."

Celebrating a "Green" Seder

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

The Jewish holiday of Tu B'Shevat, which starts at sundown Friday, has been celebrated for 2,000 years. The Holiday of Trees is big in Israel, but among many American Jews, the celebration is just starting to catch on, reflecting a contemporary urge to live more harmoniously with the natural world.

In ancient times, Tu B'Shevat (pronounced "too bish vat") marked the beginning of Israel's growing season. In the 17th century, the mystical Kabbalist sect (whose adherents now include Madonna) created a Tu B'Shevat feast modeled on the Passover seder. American Jews are now creating their own "green seders" for the occasion, combined with activities that support environmental causes.

Here's more about the holiday, its history, and how you can celebrate it:

What's a "green seder?"

Participants at a Passover seder retell the story of the Exodus from Egypt, reading from a traditional liturgy (of which there are many versions and variations). There is no existing liturgy for the Tu B'Shevat seder, which means that almost anything goes. "It's allowed for a lot of creativity," says Jill Jacobs, a Jewish educator in Irvine, Calif. "It's a great do-it-yourself holiday."

Still, most Tu B'Shevat seders adopt elements of the one created by the 17th century Kabbalists: for instance, drinking four cups of wine, starting with white, representing winter, and ending with red, symbolizing the ripe fruits of the fall harvest. Modern green seders also tend to follow the Kabbalists' custom of enjoying different types of fruits at various times during the meal - for example, fruits with shells (such as walnuts) and fruits with an inedible pit (such as dates).

What's the modern spin on the Tu B'Shevat seder?

In Savannah, Ga., Congregation Agudath Achim introduced a green seder four years ago and opened a recycling center. Adas Israel Congregation in Washington, D.C., is holding its first Tu B'Shevat seder this year and will focus on global warming. In San Francisco, EcoJews of the Bay and other groups will sponsor their third-annual green seder, featuring singing, speakers on environmental topics, and compostable dishware.

What are the roots of Tu B'Shevat?

You won't find it in the Bible. The holiday celebrates the beginning of spring in Israel, and, traditionally, marked the day from which to determine a tree's age so that its owner could properly tithe. Depending on the age of a tree, a certain proportion of its fruit was given to, say, priests or the poor.

Although Tu B'Shevat has long been a minor holiday, it took on new significance during the 19th and 20th century movement to create a Jewish homeland. After 1948, planting trees was a symbol of Israel's founding as well as a sort of Jewish Arbor Day - a time to recognize the dependence of the Jewish people on their land.

American Jews began to celebrate Tu B'Shevat in the 1970's, during the rise of the environmental movement, but only recently has it become a part of more mainstream congregations. "There's a growing ecological consciousness in the Jewish community - a lot of concern about global warming, our energy policy, and energy security," says Sybil Sanchez, director of the Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life. The Tu B'Shevat seder "is a way of feeling a positive connection to the planet, rather than just worrying about it."

Do other religions have similar holidays?

In Christianity, especially Roman Catholicism, "Rogation Days" are making a comeback, according to John Grim, a senior research scholar of comparative religion and ecology at Yale University. Around Easter, prayers are said for the health of the earth and those who work the land. There are also Hindu, Native American, and various indigenous religions that infuse appreciation for nature into particular days of observance.

Great Lakes’ Asian Carp Crisis Deepens

Kari Lydersen — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Concerns about Asian carp invading the Great Lakes have already prompted states to sue each other before the U.S. Supreme Court and led to plans for a White House summit. But those worries were ratcheted up even higher this month with the discovery of Asian carp DNA in Lake Michigan's Calumet Harbor.

The environmental DNA (known as eDNA -- more on that later) had already been found in multiple spots between Lake Michigan and the electric barrier in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal designed to block the voracious invaders and keep them from ravaging the Great Lakes' ecosystem.

With the latest discovery, environmental groups have renewed their calls to sever (ecologically speaking) the Great Lakes from the Mississippi River watershed.

The two systems were linked by canal more than a century ago so that Chicago could dump its sewage, diluted with Lake Michigan water, into the Mississippi River and keep the Great Lakes clean.

The most effective ecological separation, at least in the short term, would involve temporarily closing the locks between the canals and Lake Michigan and erecting barriers in other waterways without locks in order to impede the carp's progress. In December, Michigan filed a lawsuit backed by other states demanding emergency closure of the locks until a permanent means of ecological separation can be found.

Officials fear for water quality and the $7 billion Great Lakes fishing industry if the invaders reach Lake Michigan. Asian carp have damaged every U.S. waterway they've entered, outcompeting native species as they voraciously vacuum up plankton, and injuring boaters with their propensity for powerful leaps out of the water.

But on January 19, the U.S. Supreme Court rejected Michigan's request for immediate action without explanation, leading two lawmakers from the state, Republican Congressman David Camp and Democratic Senator Debbie Stabenow, to introduce the CARP ACT, which stands for Close All Routes and Prevent Asian Carp Today. It seeks the emergency closure of the locks and additional underwater barriers.

The Supreme Court could still act on a broader aspect of Michigan's request, which demands an end to the so-called "Chicago diversion" of Lake Michigan water. That suit was filed by Great Lakes states in 1922. In its decision at the time to leave the waterway intact, the Supreme Court left open the possibility that it could change its mind if the diversion were shown to cause harm. Michigan resuscitated the suit in December, in the face of strong opposition from the state of Illinois and industry groups that claim closing the canal would hamper shipping and flood control.

Skeptics question whether the DNA that's raising alarm bells could have been transported past the barrier on boats or barges or through Chicago's sewer system. The Army Corps of Engineers has noted that no actual Asian carp have been found past the electric barrier. But scientists with the Nature Conservancy and University of Notre Dame, who developed the eDNA test, say the discovery of DNA in multiple tests means that Asian carp have indeed breached the barrier.

Fish slough off DNA in scales, feces, urine, and mucus. Since last summer, scientists have taken hundreds of 2-liter water samples from the canals, rivers, and harbors connected to Lake Michigan. They can amplify bits of DNA taken from the biological material in the water samples and compare them with Asian carp DNA. David Lodge, the director of Notre Dame's Center for Aquatic Conservation, says scienctists don't know how long the DNA stays in water, and the tests can't tell them how many fish might be in a particular lake or river.

"It's a pretty blunt instrument at the moment," Lodge says. "All it tells us is there were fish here."

In the case of the Great Lakes, even that small indication is enough to make officials sweat. The Asian carp crisis has now made it all the way to the Oval Office (which is currently occupied by a Chicagoan, after all). President Obama's top environmental advisor recently proposed an "Asian carp" summit with Great Lakes governors in early February, and state attorneys general are demanding invitations. (UPDATE: The White House summit is now scheduled for February 8. See more below.)

The White House has called Asian carp a serious threat -- but so far has supported Illinois in the dispute. Closing all of the Chicago-area locks would entail cooperation from the federal Army Corps of Engineers, as well as state and municipal governments.

NRDC Midwest program director Henry Henderson said policymakers should take this opportunity to re-engineer an outdated shipping system that is economically inefficient and environmentally dangerous. NRDC recommends replacing the canals with a new intermodal facility that would transfer cargo from barges and ships to trucks, trains and other barges.

"Looking at Asian carp as the problem instead of the alarm bell unnecessarily truncates the solution," Henderson said. "It's not like two species of Asian carp are the problem -- this 19th century canal system has been revealed to be unambiguously a highway for invasive species."

UPDATE 02/01/2010: The Obama administration said today that it has scheduled a summit for February 8 to discuss the Asian carp crisis with Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, Wisconsin Gov. Jim Doyle, and Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn. The 2:30 p.m. meeting, closed to the public, will include Nancy Sutley, chairwoman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and officials from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the U.S. Department of the Interior, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and the U.S. Coast Guard.

Famous Frogs That Escaped California Fire Threatened by Mudslides, Red Tape

Ashley Ahearn — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

In the hills outside of Los Angeles, a fire burned for five weeks last fall, killing two firefighters, destroying 89 homes, and leaving an area about a quarter the size of Rhode Island scorched and smelling of ash.

Yet there are survivors in this charred wasteland -- ground squirrels, crows, and to the great surprise of biologists who found them nestled in one rocky creek just outside the burn area, a population of frogs thought to be nearly extinct in Southern California

They're members of a species known as the California red-legged frog. About the size of a child's baseball glove, with powerful crimson-dappled legs and bulging black-and-yellow eyes, they are the largest frog species west of the Mississippi.

But having narrowly escaped the flames, as well as human development and a disease that has pushed them to the very brink of existence, this endangered frog lies in the path of yet another life-threatening hazard -- the coming rains. The post-fire, poorly vegetated landscape is prone to flooding, which could signal the end for the lonely red-legged frog.

Life wasn't always so precarious. The pools and creeks in these parts once teemed with red-legged frogs; during California's gold rush, they were a staple of the gold miner's diet: frog leg stew, grilled frog legs, frog leg fricassee. They even starred in Mark Twain's short story "The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County."

But unfortunately for the frogs, the foothills and canyons of coastal California are where people want to live, too.

As development boomed during the second part of the 20th century, the red-legged frog population dropped by 90 percent. By 2003, scientists knew of only about 40 left in the entire southern part of their range, which stretches from Los Angeles County south to Baja. Biologists have been looking for other populations in this region for the past 10 years but have come up empty handed -- until what's known as the Station Fire subsided in early September.

Soon after it burned out, a team from the U.S. Geological Survey went in to assess the ecological damage. While following the course of a small creek, the biologists stumbled on a series of small pools in the Angeles National Forest teeming with red-legged frogs.

"It is really exciting," says Adam Backlin, a USGS biologist who has been monitoring the newfound population, which could number as many as 300. "This population may have a lot of genetic diversity that has been lost elsewhere."

The discovery represents a rare piece of good news for amphibians as a whole. "Pretty much anywhere there are frogs, we've been documenting the decline and disappearance of species," says Dr. Vance Vredenburg, an assistant professor of biology at the University of California San Francisco.

So Vredenburg is rooting for these survivors. "A lot of projects have shown that if we give them the opportunity, they will come back. And these frogs are hanging on in that area. That gives me some hope that they can expand from this spot."

Although the fires are behind them for this season, heavy rains pose another challenge. Rain falling on a scorched landscape gathers dirt, rocks and debris from the naked hillsides and mixes them into a cement-like slurry that can cover several football fields.

These mudslides race down canyons and basins at up to 35 miles per hour, leveling everything in their path. The Angeles Forest frogs wouldn't stand a chance.

So Backlin, the USGS biologist, and several state and federal wildlife agencies have been looking into potential rescue operations.

"We would normally not advocate removing animals from the wild," Backlin says. "But they're so rare, so fragmented, and the populations are so small. If we want them to persist, they need to be managed a little more aggressively."

Officials considered temporarily relocating the frogs to zoos in Los Angeles or San Diego. Unfortunately, neither zoo can spare the extra money or staff to care for them. What's more, some of the frogs have tested positive for a fungus called chytrid that is killing off amphibians around the world.

Even though many frogs survive the disease and others seem resistant to infection, the stress of captivity can leave frogs more vulnerable to the effects of the fungus. Zoo officials fear that adopting the Angeles Forest frogs could introduce chytrid into their healthy populations.

Another option would be moving the frogs into similar habitat nearby that hasn't burned. But there aren't many suitable locations, and because the red-legged frog is listed as "threatened" under wildlife regulations, a litany of requirements must be satisfied before the survivors could be relocated -- even if that move is necessary to get them out of harm's way.

"Fortunately, we haven't gotten a big rain out there yet," Backlin says, "but I don't know if they'll make it through the whole year."

Meteorologists with the AccuWeather forecasting service predict an above-normal rainy season for southern California this winter, due to a strengthening El Nino. And forecasts call for heavy rains to drench much of the Angeles National Forest as early as Monday, with downpours much of the week.

For the red-legged frog, that could be a forecast for extinction.

Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution

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

One summer, I worked in a poop lab.

When I signed up for the conservation gig at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., I thought I would get to watch cute tamarins and penguins and panda bears play. But I guess I didn't read the job description closely enough.

The only contact I had with the animals was through their scat.

I handled marble-sized marmoset droppings, earthy elephant dung and everything else in between. I scooped it, dried it, burned it and dissolved it in acid that could eat your face off. Why did my employers put me through this?

For one thing, poop can be a powerful indicator of an animal's health, and it's a whole lot easier to follow an elephant around with a shovel than bring it down with tranquilizers to draw a vial of blood.

And beyond learning about a single animal, many samples taken together can predict the vitality of an entire population -- how many animals there are, what they're eating, whether or not they are sick or reproducing. And it doesn't just work at the zoo. In the wild, those small scat samples like the ones that I studied can tell conservationists about the health of an entire ecosystem, from the plants and animals living in it to the prosperity of the people that depend on those natural resources.

Caroline Fraser's new book, Rewilding the World: Dispatches from the Conservation Revolution, provides both those poop-level and people-level views of conservation projects across the globe and helps us see how they're all interconnected.

"The environment is the economy," she writes, making the direct link between two facets of life that people often view quite separately. "No problem -- not poverty, not climate change, not the economic downturn -- can be addressed without simultaneously restoring the systems that are life itself."

Fraser, a veteran author and essayist, travels with scientists, conservationists and community leaders across the globe for her detailed, on-the-ground reporting, letting their stories unfold in candid accounts of what's working and what isn't.

At Botswana's seasonally verdant Okavango Delta, Fraser explores a project designed to protect and maintain the vast inland oasis that attracts hoards of wildlife during the rainy season and serves as an elephant habitat during the dry season. This critical water resource also supports an increasing number of farmers who are trying to grow crops in arid Botswana, giving the community a reason to help preserve it.

From her experiences in southern Africa, Fraser concludes that local support for conservation projects is paramount. Conservation imposed on people from outside forces is bound to fail.

At New York's former Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island, Fraser discovers another type of conservation project. This time the aim isn't to protect a critical resource, but to restore a degraded habitat by turning 150 million tons of garbage into a 2,200-acre park.

Rewilding is as circuitous as it is ambitious. The book tackles a lot of big issues as Fraser takes a whirlwind tour of the world's major conservation projects. She winds around the theme of grassroots activism and local conservation as the key to connecting and preserving fragmented habitats, but she never quite nails it down. It seems at times that in the face of overwhelming poverty and conflict around the globe, even all-important local support may not be enough to stave off the self-destructive tendencies of humans.

But Fraser remains an idealist. She toys with the idea that conservation has reached a tipping point. Around the world, local communities, scientists and politicians alike are reaching the consensus that wildlife is important for sustainability, especially when it comes to ecosystems that are stressed by the needs of a growing human population.

Though Fraser writes with a sense of urgency and peril, she ends on a note of hope -- that we have what it takes to protect and preserve critical ecosystems before it is too late.

And for me, the book offers a sense of consolation: perhaps my lonely summer in the poop lab wasn't for naught.

Best Environmental Journalism of 2009

Scott Dodd — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Major news organizations are cutting science reporters, stoking fears that important journalism on environmental issues is in danger of drying up. Yet we still managed to find plenty of good work to celebrate this year -- and not just in our own pages! So we asked OnEarth staff and contributors to recommend the books, magazine articles, newspaper stories and online reporting that had the greatest impact on them in 2009. Here are the results:

Wisdom of the Last Farmer: Harvesting Legacies from the Land
David Mas Masumoto (Free Press)

Behind every organic label you see in your grocery store or food co-op, there's a story. Many of them aren't very interesting. Catering to the likes of Wal-Mart, an increasing number of organic farms are large-scale, corporate-owned operations, not all that different from conventional farms in their soulless methods of mass-production. In Wisdom of the Last Farmer, David Mas Masumoto tells the most fascinating kind of story, reminding us that, at its best and most authentic, organic farming requires not only soul, but intimate knowledge of place, a deep grasp of subjects ranging from plant physiology to tractor repair, and unrelenting physical labor. Masumoto here continues the chronicle of his family's 80-acre fruit farm in California's Central Valley that he introduced in his memorable 1996 book, Epitaph for a Peach. Chapter 1 begins on a February day when his 76-year-old father suffers a stroke while disking weeds between rows of 100-year-old grapevines. Nearing despair as the price of heirloom peaches declines along with his father's health, Masumoto weaves an inspiring yet unflinchingly honest narrative of redemption and healing. The book teaches us that, ultimately, a healthy food chain is about the careful, labor-intensive cultivation of human relationships right along with the earth. -- Craig Canine, contributing editor

Nukes of Hazard
Greg Harman, The San Antonio Current, September-October 2009

In a 13,000-word, three-part series, San Antonio environmental writer Greg Harman shows readers what's at stake in the current industry campaign to create a "nuclear renaissance" in Texas. Harman uses primary source documents, original research, and dozens of interviews with key players on both sides of this critical issue. The piece is beautifully written and structurally solid, an exemplar of its genre. Harman presents a narrative version of a life-cycle analysis. Part 1 looks at the short- and long-term effects of uranium mining. Part 2 delves into the business practices and promises of the Texas nuclear industry. Part 3 concludes with the unsolved problem of what to do with nuclear waste and what's happening with it now. Nukes of Hazard is exactly what alternative weeklies are supposed to provide but frequently don't: a powerfully written, in-depth piece about an issue that is most important to readers -- now that they've found out about it. -- Osha Gray Davidson, correspondent

Toxic Waters
Charles Duhigg, The New York Times, August-December 2009

Duhigg's investigative reporting has uncovered a series of disturbing revelations about the water we drink. He started in August with news that the weed killer atrazine might be more dangerous (and contaminating more of our reservoirs) than previously thought. In September, he told readers that chemical companies have violated the Clean Water Act more than 500,000 times in the last five years, mostly without punishment. By October, Duhigg was explaining that because of tougher air pollution laws, much of what coal-fired power plants once spewed into the atmosphere is now dumped into lakes, rivers and groundwater instead. Then in November, more bad news: More than 9,400 of the nation's sewage systems have broken the law by dumping human waste, chemicals and other hazardous materials into lakes and rivers over the last three years alone (and those are just the ones that reported it). Duhigg's revelations (which continue this month) are spurring efforts to strengthen enforcement and fix shortcomings and loopholes in the 1972 Clean Water Act. Those are the kind of results that Pulitzer Prize jurors love; expect Duhigg's work to contend for the award this spring. -- Scott Dodd, online news editor

Special Report: The Consequences of Copenhagen
Douglas Fischer, The Daily Climate, November 2009

To open his four-part series on the global stakes of climate change, Douglas Fischer, editor of The Daily Climate (an online publication of the nonprofit Environmental Health Services), writes: "This is the consequence of failure at Copenhagen: A marked shift in scientific effort from solving global warming to adapting to its consequences, a hodge-podge of uncoordinated local efforts to trim emissions -- none of which deliver the necessary cuts -- and an altered climate." Fischer's first installment laid out, in unequivocal terms, what was at stake around the world as leaders came together to negotiate a deal in Copenhagen (a process that had decidedly mixed results). A focus on local mitigation efforts, in the second installment, adds a note of hope to the series by examining efforts that are moving cities and states in the right direction. The final two pieces look at geoengineers -- the people tasked with helping us navigate an adapting world -- and the new green economy, in which "industry's full-throttle acceleration toward a low-carbon future" might offer our best chance of beating climate change. Fischer's narrative is a reminder that the planet's clock is ticking -- and it is perhaps even more chilling in the harsh light of our new, post-Copenhagen world. -- Crystal Gammon, intern

Green Like Me: Living without a fridge and other experiments in environmentalism
Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker, August 31, 2009

Elizabeth Kolbert pokes with a sharp stick in this omnibus review of recent environmental titles. In particular, she uses the self-importance and calculation of the "No Impact Man" phenomenon to describe the yawning gap between adopting a "green lifestyle" and actually solving environmental problems. Renouncing material goods -- or "buying green" -- while failing to do anything about the extraordinary waste surrounding you won't change the world, no matter how many books it sells, or how personally gratifying it may be. -- Emily Gertz, correspondent

Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming
James Hoggan with Richard Littlemore (Greystone Books)

How exactly is it that -- a full 20 years after George Bush the Elder promised to beat the greenhouse effect with the "White House Effect" -- the majority of Americans still either doubt or are unclear about the science of climate change? Jim Hoggan and Richard Littlemore's Climate Cover-Up helps explain, laying out the deliberate (and most would say immoral) campaign to manipulate the public discourse on climate change. Hoggan, a PR guy, and Littlemore, a journalist, make for a fierce team. The flack in Hoggan can sniff out unsavory public relations tricks a mile away, and he knows where to look and who to ask for leaked memos and confidential studies. Through meticulously documented analysis, Climate Cover-Up picks up where Ross Gelbspan's 2005 Boiling Point left off, gathering research originally published on the website Desmogblog.com into a coherent narrative that chronicles the fossil fuel industry's efforts to discredit climate science and manufacture confusion. You'll be outraged. (Download the first chapter here.) -- Ben Jervey, community editor

The Last Breakup
Ted Genoways, Mother Jones, November/December 2009

Mother Jones' special issue previewing the Copenhagen climate conference ("Climate Countdown," November/December 2009) was full of compelling stories about what's at stake in international climate negotiations -- none moreso than Ted Genoways' article on the Yukon River and one man's race to keep it from reclaiming the Alaskan frontier. Suspenseful and dramatic, the story gave readers a chilling view of a place and situation that most of us can't imagine -- the worst flooding in the Yukon's recorded history, which took place in May. Genoways' in-depth reporting and storytelling vividly illustrated the fury of nature (while suggesting that said fury is a product of our own devising) and the resilience of those who live at extremes. -- Elizabeth Royte, contributing editor

Bohemian Tragedy
Alex Shoumatoff, Vanity Fair, May 2009

[Editor's note: Hey, when we asked our contributors to submit their favorite stories of the year, we didn't say they couldn't vote for themsevles!] An hour and a half north of San Francisco, the 3,000-acre Bohemian Grove Club's membership includes many of the country's top CEOs, pillars of the military establishment, prominent Republicans and, until four years ago, one of author Alex Shoumatoff's old college buddies. This fourth-generation member discovered that the club had been clandestinely logging ancient redwoods in remote parts of the Grove -- unbeknownst to most of the club's members -- for 22 years. "It's not that they need the money, but they want it," a neighbor of the club told the author. He uncovered a web of collusion reminiscent of the movie Chinatown that includes the club's management, the California Department of Forestry and Fire Prevention, the Save the Redwood League, a top redwood ecologist, and the IRS. He's now in discussions with Jane Fonda, who wants to make a movie about the story. -- Alex Shoumatoff, contributing editor

Drugging Our Waters

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

Editor's note: The Associated Press reported in December 2009 that federal regulators under President Obama are taking the first steps toward regulating drugs in the nation's drinking water supply. The problem was first reported in this OnEarth story, which was originally published in our Fall 2006 issue.

Norman Leonard moved to Heritage Village, a sprawling retirement community in western Connecticut, 11 years ago. Its green-gabled condominiums and Capes were well maintained, and the landscapers hadn't skimped on the rhododendrons. A retired CPA, Leonard considers himself, at age 80, to be in pretty decent shape: He plays platform tennis on the grounds and hikes often in nearby forests and reserves. But still, he takes five different drugs a day to manage his blood pressure, acid reflux, and high cholesterol. Heritage Village is home to about 4,000 residents with similar medical profiles, who take an average of six drugs a day.

And that's a healthy population. In a convalescent home a few miles away, Patricia Reilly, age 88, wheels herself each morning toward a low shelf. With a glass of water and small cups of applesauce at the ready, she prepares to take her morning medicines: nine different types that treat heart disease, acid reflux, renal stones, a chronic urinary-tract infection, chronic constipation, migraine headaches, depression, allergic rhinitis, degenerative arthritis, and intermittent vertigo. The 120 residents of River Glen Health Care Center, where the average age is 90, take an average of eight drugs a day; the most common among them target high cholesterol, high blood pressure, depression, and diabetes. Once swallowed, Reilly's medications will bring her some relief, but their biological activity won't stop once they leave her body.

When residents of Heritage Village and two other nearby retirement communities flush their toilets, wastewater laced with traces of prescription drugs rushes through a series of pipes into the Heritage Village treatment plant. This flushing is the main pathway by which pharmaceuticals enter the environment. Hospitals and nursing homes routinely dump unused or expired pills down the toilet, and consumers have been advised to do the same; effluent from pharmaceutical manufacturers also ends up at municipal wastewater treatment plants. Through a process of settling and aeration, the Heritage Village plant separates liquids from solids, treats the liquid portion with disinfectant, and then discharges this effluent into a mini-creek that meanders between the third green and the seventh tee of the Heritage Village golf course. Making its way through a riparian band of oaks and maples, the creek fans out into the Pomperaug River, which loops without further interruption through the town of Southbury.

The Pomperaug looks no different upstream or down, but studies by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) on other rivers suggest that the Pomperaug below the effluent creek carries the signatures of drugs consumed by anyone plumbed into the Heritage Village system. The effect of those drugs on the environment, and possibly on those who drink water pumped from those streams, is only beginning to be understood.

We are a nation obsessed with pharmaceuticals. We spend vast sums to manage our health, and we pop pills to address every conceivable symptom. Some elderly Americans take as many as 30 drugs a day, some of them merely to counteract the effects of others. Prescription drug sales rose by an annual average of 11 percent between 2000 and 2005. Americans now fill more than three billion prescriptions a year; nationwide, more than 10 million women take birth-control pills, and about the same number are on hormone-replacement therapy.

The rate at which prescriptions are dispensed is only going up as the population ages. Already, those over 65 fill twice as many prescriptions per year as do younger Americans. Inevitably, more drugs will be headed into waterways like the Pomperaug. Our rivers -- already stressed by pollutants, groundwater pumping, reduced flows, and overburdened wastewater treatment plants that dump raw sewage -- will be ever less able to cope.

Alarmed by data that showed trace levels of pharmaceuticals in European streams, researchers in the United States have begun to survey our nation's waterways. In 2002, the USGS published the results of its first-ever reconnaissance of man-made contaminants. Using highly sensitive assays, the agency found traces of 82 different organic contaminants -- fertilizers and flame retardants as well as pharmaceuticals -- in surface waters across the nation. These drugs included natural and synthetic hormones, antibiotics, antihypertensives, painkillers, and antidepressants.

Now that science has documented the presence of free-flowing pharmaceuticals, researchers are faced with another, far more difficult, pair of questions: What does this mean for the environment, and what does it mean for us? Early evidence of harm to aquatic organisms is giving researchers grounds for real concern.

On a dull November morning, two graduate students from the University of Connecticut shiver on the steep banks of the Pomperaug. Monotonously, repetitively, they plunge plastic jars two feet down into the beer-colored water. Five-minute intervals tick away on a stopwatch. "Is it here yet?" asks Dan Seremet. He's now midstream, his fleece cuffs dripping onto his chest waders. Raquel Figueroa, squatting in a drift of crisp oak leaves, slips a vial of water into a portable fluorometer, closes the gizmo's cover, taps a button, and answers, "Point one nine."

So, no. It isn't here yet.

Five minutes pass, Raquel shouts in her tiny voice, "Go!" and Dan, maneuvering over slippery rocks, dips his jar again. Two hours pass, in five-minute chunks, and the fluorometer, which detects and measures specific particles in the water, rises only to 0.65 parts per billion (ppb).

"Maybe we're in the wrong river," Dan sighs. Raquel doesn't bother to answer. She logs the time and the concentrations. She dumps out samples. She painstakingly removes a bittersweet vine holding her leg prisoner. "Next time we should bring pruners," she says to no one in particular. Then, "Go!" Dan dips.

In 30 minutes, the fluorometer rises to 2.45. Nothing to get excited about: When the half cup of fluorescent magenta dye -- poured into the Pomperaug two miles upstream and two hours earlier -- flowed past the previous monitoring station, the reading peaked at just over 4 ppb. "Uh-oh," says Raquel when she takes the next reading. "We're down to 2.301." In another five minutes it is 2.25.

"I guess that was the peak," says Dan, his voice the opposite of a peak, as he clambers out of the streambed. He and Raquel pack up their bottles and log books, the fluorometer, a tape measure, and a flow meter (basically a pair of spinning blades on a stick, used to measure the water's velocity), then drive downstream to do it all again with the boss, at the last of four monitoring stations.

The boss is Allison MacKay, an environmental engineer who specializes in aquatic chemistry at the University of Connecticut. MacKay had risen at four o'clock in the morning and loaded her car with gear, plus the sleepy Dan and Raquel, then drove west to Southbury. By eight, she had poured her dye into the Pomperaug at the point where it receives the Heritage Village effluent. (Invisible to the naked eye, the dye is nontoxic and will degrade in sunlight over three days.) With her grad students MacKay is tracking the dye's progress down a six-mile stretch. The concentration of the dye, read by the fluorometer, will tell her both the rate at which the Pomperaug flows and the rate at which a particular contaminant is diluted as it flows downstream -- two useful bits of information when you're studying the movement of contaminants from a single source. MacKay and her helpers are also taking water samples that will later be analyzed for the presence of the same 82 organic contaminants originally assayed by the USGS.

In a turquoise parka and insulated pants, MacKay kneels on the sandy bank. Her cheeks are pink in the cold air. If there is any fun to be had along a New England river in November, this crew refuses to acknowledge it. There are no observations on flora or fauna, no chitchat, no stone skipping or stick building. MacKay is all business, and her students follow her lead. For eight hours (no lunch break) they collect water and measure the river's depth, width, and velocity.

"The USGS does grab samples," says MacKay, rapidly punching a series of numbers into her calculator and plotting points on a hand-drawn graph. Grab samples are like snapshots, a single moment in a single place in a stream. "Their studies established the presence of drugs in our waterways, but no one in this country has looked at the temporal and spatial distribution or the environmental degradation rates of pharmaceuticals in surface water. That's what I'm doing." Among the factors that influence the compounds' fate are sunlight, temperature, flow rate, microorganisms in the sediment, minerals, and other chemicals in the water. If concentrations of any particular contaminant decrease, MacKay explains, she'll set up controlled lab experiments to see where, when, and how it happened: Was it the sun degrading the compound, a change in temperature, or an organism that might have consumed it? If aquatic life is suffering, she continues, researchers will need to know what concentrations they're being exposed to at different points in the stream.

This stretch of the Pomperaug makes an ideal laboratory for MacKay's study: It is wadeable, and it has only one significant input of both water and prescription compounds -- the Heritage Village treatment plant. The river is also a paradigm of the nation's threatened waterways, of the large- and small-scale changes that our growing population has wrought. Still, to drive the country roads of Southbury and its neighboring villages is to marvel at what hasn't changed in the past 200 years. Well-kept colonial houses still flank water mills; nineteenth-century farm fences decorously sag. The stream banks are, for the most part, intact. Trout congregate in deep pools. Though some of its meanders and oxbows were mechanically straightened more than half a century ago, the river still flows past horse farms and hemlock glades and rolling hills.

One can't help thinking the Pomperaug is privileged to run through a stronghold of the well-to-do. All American rivers are, at some level, endangered, but this one's remaining virtues are particularly obvious. Not only is there plenty worth saving here, there are also plenty of stakeholders eager to do the saving, among them a mild-mannered, semiretired internist named Marc Taylor, who happens to live just a few miles downstream from MacKay's sampling sites.

Taylor is the medical director of the River Glen Health Care Center, where Patricia Reilly lives, but he spends an inordinate amount of time fretting -- in public meetings and in private telephone calls with scientists, politicians, city planners, and conservation groups -- about the health of his river. "I'm concerned about pharmaceuticals in the river because I am a doctor," says Taylor, who speaks in precisely measured sentences, "and because I know these drugs are bioactive." That is, they can enter the bioprocesses of aquatic organisms.

As chairman of the Pomperaug River Watershed Coalition, Taylor has watched with increasing concern as developers cut streets into nearby hillsides, shopping centers supplant farms and orchards, and waves of the elderly flock to four planned communities within the town limits. "As the population of the watershed goes up," says Taylor, sitting in his basement office surrounded by maps of the region, "more groundwater is being pumped. We've got three public water companies drawing water from wells sunk near the Pomperaug." With a few computer keystrokes, Taylor pulls up real-time data from a gauging station on the river. This afternoon's flow is 250 cubic feet per second. Last summer it dropped to 8 cubic feet per second -- one of the lowest flow rates in the river's recorded history. Some small streams in the Pomperaug watershed now completely disappear in the summer.

The Pomperaug's peril is not unique. "Across the nation rivers are stressed," says Katherine Baer, advocacy director for American Rivers, which is based in Washington, D.C. "As drought becomes more common, there is less water in streams for aquatic life. Everywhere we see more development, sprawl, and increased population. So we get higher pollution loads. Pharmaceuticals, which become more concentrated with low water, are only increasing the burden."

At the present time, in a project unrelated to its study of contaminants, the USGS is making hydrologic models of how water enters, moves through, and leaves the Pomperaug watershed. The Pomperaug River Watershed Coalition is studying water quality, the dilution of treated wastewater, and, with the help of Allison MacKay, the environmental fate of compounds left behind after drugs have been metabolized by our bodies, as well as that portion of the drugs that passes through us without being absorbed.

According to the Environmental Protection Agency, which is putting together a database of literature on so-called emerging contaminants, those metabolites are virtually everywhere, from the iconically dirty Chicago River to the iconically pristine headwaters of Boulder Creek in Colorado. They're in the intakes and outflows of water facilities in both urban and rural areas, in groundwater, mountain streams, surface water, and domestic wells. And while levels of pharmaceuticals are sometimes infinitesimally low, their supplies are continually replenished. As a result, organisms that constantly bathe in a chemical broth are beginning to reveal some alarming abnormalities.

In Boulder Creek, David Norris, an environmental endocrinologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, found that female white suckers, bottom-feeding fish that grow up to a foot long, outnumber males by more than five to one, and that 50 percent of males have female sex tissue. Similar intersex changes have been found in flat-head chubs and smallmouth bass. The cause, Norris suspects, is exposure to estrogen. Like most pharmaceuticals, hormones aren't designed to break down easily. They're supposed to have an effect at low dosages with chronic use, and they only partly dissolve in water.

"I'm worried for fish populations, and I'm worried for human populations," says Norris. "The levels found in Boulder Creek are low in absolute terms, but they aren't low on the biological level. You could have six chemicals below the no-effect level, but all together they are above the no-effect level." In lab tests, frogs and rats have developed infections and deformities after being exposed to multiple pollutants at extremely low levels. Since exposure to only one compound is rare in the modern world, sorting out "mixture effects" is a daunting but critical research area. The estrogenic compounds in drinking water, Norris says, are "adding to the general exposure of the human population to environmental estrogens in our foods, and in containers that hold our foods. They all work through the same mechanisms." In the United Kingdom, hormones in the environment have been linked with lowered sperm counts and gynecomastia -- the development of breasts in men.

A Baylor University researcher found tiny amounts of Prozac in liver and brain tissue of channel catfish and black crappie captured in a creek near Dallas that receives almost all of its flow from a wastewater treatment plant. The creek also connects to a drinking water supply. A University of Georgia scientist found that tadpoles exposed to Prozac morphed into undersize frogs, which are vulnerable to predation and environmental stress. The EPA reports that antidepressants can have a profound effect on spawning and other behaviors in shellfish and that calcium-channel blockers (used to relieve chest pain and hypertension) can dramatically inhibit sperm activity in some aquatic organisms. Even at extremely low levels, ibuprofen, steroids, and antifibrotics -- a class of drugs that helps reduce the development of scar tissue -- block fin regeneration in fish. According to a report by the Scientific Committee on Problems of the Environment, a worldwide network of scientists and scientific institutions, and the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry, more than 200 species -- aquatic and terrestrial -- are known or suspected to have experienced adverse reactions to such endocrine disruptors as estrogen and its synthetic mimics. (See "Hundreds of Man-Made Chemicals Are Interfering With Our Hormones and Threatening Our Children's Future" by Gay Daly, OnEarth, Winter 2006.)

Experts say pharmaceuticals have probably been in the environment for as long as we've been using them. We're discovering them now because analytical methods sensitive at the parts-per-trillion level and lower were only recently developed. Surely the technology is a boon to society, but it opens a Pandora's box of questions. We know that low concentrations of some pharmaceuticals are affecting aquatic organisms, but what are they doing to humans? What happens when organisms are exposed to multiple chemicals at the same time? What happens when they bioconcentrate in living creatures or accumulate in sediment?

Traditionally, toxicologists have assessed environmental and health risks one chemical at a time, focusing on such end points as birth defects or cancer. More recently, scientists have begun to examine effects from combinations of chemicals, an approach that more closely mimics the way organisms are exposed to chemicals in the environment. Looking at end points that include immune and reproductive system dysfunctions and neurological, cognitive, and behavioral effects, researchers are finding that mixtures of chemicals can lead to effects at much lower levels than do single chemicals, and that low-level exposure can often induce results not seen at higher levels. Nearly every week, results of new studies on emerging contaminants appear in toxicology and environmental health journals.

"It may seem impossible to figure out what's happening," says Christian Daughton, chief of the environmental chemistry branch of the EPA's National Exposure Research Laboratory in Las Vegas, "but technology has a way of leapfrogging. Less than a decade ago no one thought you could map the human genome. Analytical chemistry progresses at a fast rate. Remember, we're only talking about this now because we developed the technology to find these compounds."

Parsing the downstream effects of pharmaceutical compounds is an exceedingly complicated task. For one thing, more than 100 new drugs -- both prescription and over-the-counter -- are introduced each year. Researchers are confronted with long latency periods for some human diseases, making it difficult to connect an illness or disorder with long-ago exposures. Some of the drugs in our waterways act upon more than one hormonal pathway; some may end up in humans through multiple exposures (for example, antibiotics from both food and water); and exposure to mixtures of contaminants may lead to an adverse effect using one particular recipe, but produce a dif-ferent effect when the ratio of those same ingredients is changed. "For many of these drugs, the mechanism of action for humans is unknown," says Daughton. "So it's difficult to anticipate what's going to happen to them after they've entered the environment. There isn't even a database for all published work to show their presence, their location, and their concentration."

This fall, when water flows are at their lowest, Allison MacKay, accompanied by Raquel and another grad student, hopes to inch down the riverbanks once again to capture small pieces of the Pomperaug. MacKay knows her study is just the beginning of a very long process, but it is fundamental to an understanding of drugs in our waterways. "The power of knowing about the fate of these compounds is to use it in a predictive way," MacKay says. "Once we know what's happening, we can say, 'I'm going to release this, and this is when it will degrade.' I don't know about drugs, but pesticides have been reformulated to degrade faster and be less bioaccumulative in water-ways."

Could manufacturers reformulate pharmaceuticals in a similar way? "There's a trade-off in terms of having molecules break down readily versus having a stable molecule that does its work as a medicine and has a reasonable shelf life," says Thomas White, a technical consultant to the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America (PhRMA), which represents brand-name drug manufacturers and accounts for 80 percent of all drug sales in the United States. "We've looked at studies of 26 compounds and there doesn't appear to be any human health risk." Because there is no accepted methodology for evaluating interactions among active pharmaceutical ingredients, the studies that PhRMA reviewed, which came from a variety of sources, considered drugs singly, not in combination. The PhRMA review included antibiotics, cardiovascular drugs, and antidepressants, but not estrogen or steroids. "Hormones," White concedes, "are a class of drug that would be a problem: They're designed to affect the human endocrine system. Their fate effects are under study now."

Marc Taylor, like many health-care professionals, thinks a good first step for getting drugs out of waterways is to persuade hospitals and nursing homes to abandon their policy of flushing unused drugs down the toilet. A handful of states and municipalities have launched pharmaceutical take-back programs, in which consumers bring unwanted or expired medications to an official collection site. Drugs are then either returned to manufacturers or disposed of by incineration. But creating a national return policy is more complex than it sounds. "You've got federal and state regulations, the governing boards of pharmacies, and the Drug Enforcement Agency," says Daughton. "Everyone has to get together."

Even if the federal government did devise such a policy, it would deal only with unused drugs, not with those actually swallowed and then flushed, which is the primary pathway to the environment. If redesigning drugs to break down sooner in the environment is a non-starter, then what about improving wastewater treatment? "We already have the tools and technology to take out everything," says Lynn Orphan, former president of the Water Environment Federation, which represents operators of municipal wastewater treatment plants. "We can use activated carbon or membrane filters, which have tiny pores. There's reverse-osmosis filtration [which removes organic contaminants] and exposure to ozone or to ultraviolet light. Sometimes it's just a matter of extra retention time in holding tanks."

But Hugh Kaufman, a senior policy analyst on waste issues at the EPA, says, "Some of those technologies have been demonstrated to work in a laboratory, but they haven't been scaled up for day-to-day use. The cost of putting them in place, plus their operation, is astronomical -- hundreds of millions over the lifetime of a plant."

Standing in his backyard, Marc Taylor can, with little effort, toss a stone into the riffles of the Pomperaug. The water is so clear that he could, if he wanted, easily retrieve it. He continues to swim in the river and to drink from it -- his well water comes from the Pomperaug aquifer.

As he awaits the results of MacKay's study, Taylor says, "I'll keep prescribing the medications that Patricia Reilly and my other patients need." In a philosophical mode, he continues, "The public will have to get used to the reality that the drugs and chemicals we use all go somewhere and have potential effects. The environmental fate of all consequential drugs and chemicals should be known. It's worth studying because this problem is only going to get worse as the population ages." For now, he says, "we'll have to rely on the health of the fauna in our rivers to get hints about the consequences to people. The fish and the amphibians are our canaries."

‘Missile with Fins’ Aimed at Great Lakes

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

In 1900, the city of Chicago had a problem: how to get rid of all the sewage it was dumping into Lake Michigan, which also provided the city's drinking water. The solution was to build the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal to divert wastewater away from the lakes, a move that famously reversed the flow of the Chicago River and created the first and only canal connecting the Great Lakes with the Mississippi River.

And therein lies the problem. More than a century later, that canal threatens to deliver an even greater evil to the Great Lakes. It's so bad that officials temporarily poisoned the waters of the canal earlier this month, making it inhospitable to aquatic life -- with the support of environmentalists, no less.

Meanwhile, the federal government has ponied up millions of dollars to ward off this potential intruder, and the state of Michigan is preparing to sue neighboring Illinois to close the canal for good.

All because of a fish.

Not just any fish, though. This is the Asian carp, weighing in at up to 100 pounds, with an appetite so voracious that it out-eats most native fish and disrupts the food web wherever it goes. It has been working its way up the Mississippi and Illinois Rivers for more than a decade now, making a name for itself by leaping out of the water and colliding with unsuspecting boaters.

It's been called a "missile with fins."

The fear is that the carp will transform the Great Lakes ecosystem into something unrecognizable. One need only look at infested sections of the Illinois River, where federal environmental officials say that carp now comprise nine out of every 10 pounds of living material -- plant or animal -- found in the water. An invasion could devastate the Great Lakes' $7 billion fishing industry and harm the drinking water supply relied on by 40 million people.

"Sooner or later, those carp are going to find a breeding home" in Lake Michigan, said Joel Brammeier, acting president of the Alliance for the Great Lakes, a Chicago advocacy group. "And once that happens, there's going to be no stopping the Asian carp in the Great Lakes."

For many, this feels like déjà vu. Lake Michigan has been overrun by invasive species before -- most notably the zebra and quagga mussels. The mussels have filter-fed the lake to the point where its waters are remarkably clear. This allows sunlight to penetrate far deeper than before, which causes large algae blooms. Beyond altering the lake's ecosystem, this creates lush habitat for toxins such as E. coli.

Because the carp also filter feed -- up to 40 percent of their body weight daily -- there's concern that their arrival would speed this change along. Currently, invasive species in the Great Lakes are estimated to cost the region $200 million a year in lost commercial and recreational fishing revenue and in repairs to water-intake systems, which get clogged by invasive mussels.

A single, electrified barrier, nicknamed the "fish fence," is all that separates the carp-infested Illinois River from the lakes. If that barrier needs to be shut down for maintenance -- and occasionally, it does -- there's nothing to stop the intruders from making their way into the lakes.

So out of utter desperation, the canal was poisoned earlier this month while the fence was out of action. About 20 miles from Lake Michigan, a 5.5-mile stretch of water between the barrier and a lock leading into the lake was treated with rotenone, a fish poison, to kill any Asian carp lurking there -- along with any other varieties of native fish unlucky enough to be swimming nearby.

The Illinois Department of Natural Resources said the state and federal agencies involved spent $3.1 million on the project. It estimates that the chemical killed about 200,000 pounds of fish, of which only one turned out to be an Asian carp.

Officials and environmentalists were relieved that large numbers of carp weren't found past the barrier -- but even just one proves that they're perilously close to the lake.

This wasn't the first sign that carp might have swum beyond the fence. The Army Corps of Engineers has been conducting DNA tests in the water past the barrier. Testing this fall showed snippets of Asian carp just eight miles from the lake.

It wasn't even a whole fish, just some biological material, but it was enough to raise the threat level -- especially when the fish fence needed to come down for maintenance this month. Many environmental groups, who normally wouldn't cheer a plan to dump poison into the water, supported the action.

"No one wants to see that," said Thom Cmar, a Chicago-based attorney with NRDC. But "the alternative is far worse."

The federal government agrees. This week, it announced that it would devote $13 million to fight the carp invasion. Most of the money will fund the Army Corps of Engineers, which is trying to cut off potential backdoor routes between the canal and the lake (such as heavy rains causing flooding that would sweep the fish into other waterways). The money will also be used to expand DNA testing as an early warning system.

As with most battles against invasive species, this situation is one of man's own making. The carp were imported to the South in the 1970s for aquaculture and wastewater treatment facilities. Their job was to keep retention ponds clean through their voracious appetites. But they escaped into the Mississippi River during flooding in the 90s and have been swimming steadily upstream ever since.

The only real solution to stopping the carp's spread, according to the state of Michigan and environmental groups, is to port a cork in the connection between the Mississippi and the Great Lakes built more than a century ago.

"The end point clearly needs to be biological separation," said Marc Gaden, spokesman for the Great Lakes Fishery Commission in Ann Arbor, Mich., which focuses on protecting the lakes' fishing industry. That means finding a way that commerce between the rivers and lakes could continue -- but with sufficient measures in place to ensure that one ecosystem couldn't contaminate the other.

A spokeswoman for the Army Corps of Engineers said all options are being explored to determine the best way to fight the carp. But various local and federal agencies in change of the waterways have set no timeline to come up with a decision. Advocates are growing frustrated with the government's deliberations in the face of what they see as an immediate threat to the lakes and the region's quality of life.

"We've already had lots of time to look at the issues," wrote Henry Henderson, director of NRDC's Midwest office, in a recent blog post. "This has been a slow-motion tragedy that requires emergency action now to buy us the time we need to solve this problem effectively."

NRDC and other environmental groups want to see the locks on the canal closed as a first step toward stopping the current threat. The Michigan attorney general's office has already announced its intention to sue the Army Corps of Engineers, the state of Illinois, and the Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago to force the cutoff.

According to NRDC's Cmar, new technologies could end the city's reliance on the canal for its wastewater needs. But that still leaves the question of shipping; the canal has become an important conduit between the lakes and the Mississippi.

Cmar says the government could start creating intermodal facilities that would transfer cargo to trains or trucks, connecting the river with the rest of Chicago's vast transportation network while bypassing or greatly reducing the burden on the canal.

"It doesn't make sense for Chicago to still be relying on 19th century solutions," he said. Especially not when a 21st century invader is posing one of the most serious natural threats in the city's history.

Update: On December 21, Michigan asked the U.S. Supreme Court to close navigational locks in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal to prevent the Asian carp from reaching the Great Lakes.

Big Apple Poised to Legalize Beekeeping

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

Soon, beekeepers in New York City may no longer be breaking the law.

After months of prodding from rooftop beekeepers and proponents of community agriculture, the Department of Health on Thursday took the first step toward removing honey bees from a list of animals that residents are prohibited from raising within the five boroughs.

The list includes lions, pit vipers, crocodiles and other animals "naturally inclined to do harm." Bees were added in 1999, during the Giuliani administration.

The health department's action came with little attention or fanfare. A bill to overturn the ban had been introduced and loudly trumpeted in the New York City Council earlier this year, prompting a round of local and national news coverage about urban beekeeping, but it never went anywhere.

So instead, activists appealed to the city health department, which gave a preliminary OK to making the change in a quarterly Board of Health meeting on Thursday. The action requires a second vote in March, following a public comment period, to take effect.

Beekeeping advocates are happy to a see a change in the works. "We're very pleased to be able to encourage proper beekeeping training without feeling like we are skirting the law," said Liane Newton, the incoming organizer of the New York City Beekeeping Meetup Group.

City beekeeping has grown in popularity alongside community gardens in recent years (there are now about 600 gardens cropping up throughout the city). Bees produce honey, which can be sold at local farmers markets, and are necessary to pollinate many of the plants that gardeners grow.

Cities such as Denver and Los Angeles promote beekeeping as part of urban sustainability initiatives. Chicago even keeps hives on the rooftop of its city hall.

Bees worldwide may be in trouble, however -- victims of a mysterious and as-yet unexplained phenomenon known as Colony Collapse Disorder. Commercial beekeepers across the United States reported initial losses of 30 to 90 percent of their hives in 2006. Those losses have continued, hovering near 30 percent each year.

These mysterious honey bee deaths cause many experts to worry about the economic stability of our current food production system, which relies so heavily on one type of pollinator. That's one reason that environmental organizations, including the Natural Resources Defense Council, have supported efforts to legalize urban beekeeping.

"We can't really afford to outlaw beekeeping anywhere," said Gabriela Chavarria, the director of the NRDC's Science Center and an entomologist by training. "The reality is that honey bees are necessary for agriculture, and we need to eat."

In New York, beekeeping has thrived despite the citywide ban. There are training sessions, honey co-ops, social gatherings and lessons for schoolchildren in community gardens from the Bronx to Brooklyn. Rooftop and back alley hives can be found throughout the five boroughs. More than 100 people have signed up for spring classes through the New York City Beekeeping Meetup, according to Newton.

But until now, beekeepers were risking a fine ranging from $200 to $2,000 if a neighbor complained to city officials.

From the beginning of 2009 through October 31, the health department received 162 complaints related to harboring bees and wasps, officials said. The department wouldn't say how many beekeepers had been cited, although The New York Times reported this summer that four summonses had been issued through the first half of 2009.

Now, beekeepers could soon be free to come out of the shadows without risk. "We're really excited to start building support for community gardeners who want to raise bees and do it legally," said Jacquie Berger, executive director of Just Food.

As a nonprofit focused on increasing access to healthy, locally grown food throughout the city's neighborhoods, Just Food launched an effort three years ago to raise awareness of the agricultural and economic opportunities created by bees.

The organization circulated a petition to legalize urban beekeeping and coordinated an awareness campaign in June that included a public forum at City Hall and a beekeepers ball.

More than 2,000 people signed the petition, said Nancy Clark, the city's assistant commissioner of environmental disease prevention, at Tuesday's health board meeting.

Until recently, though, it looked as though urban beekeeping would remain illegal for another year. Council member David Yassky, who had proposed a bill to legalize it, left office this month before the bill went to committee.

But the Board of Health has the authority to amend health codes without legislative action. On February 3, the health department will hold a public hearing on the proposal introduced Thursday to change its animal regulations. Lifting the prohibition on bees is one of a number of revisions on animals being considered.

Barring any public outcry, the changes are expected to be approved at the next board meeting in March, and beekeeping would be legal by spring.

Good timing, since that's when now-dormant hives across the city will begin to buzz, and plants in need of pollination will be ready to welcome honey bees again.

Homeless on the Range

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

In the northern Rockies, it's not unusual to see bison ambling about in a roadside pasture. So to a passerby, the herd near Yankee Jim Canyon, about 10 miles north of Yellowstone, probably doesn't merit a second glance. It just looks like twenty-odd female bison and their calves, milling about in a field.

But these bison are special -- and what makes them distinct has put them at the epicenter of an emotional controversy that has divided Montanans and raised troubling questions about wildlife management in the greater Yellowstone ecosystem.

Most of the bison that you see in roadside pens are domestic livestock, and many of them were crossbred with cattle long ago. The largest remaining herd of wild bison in the United States, and the majority of the genetically pure bison alive today, can be found in Yellowstone National Park.

The bison in this pasture are part of two larger groups of about 100 animals each that were captured as they wandered north from Yellowstone beginning in 2005. Under policies designed to protect ranchers' livestock from brucellosis, which causes females to spontaneously abort their calves, the wanderers would ordinarily have faced slaughter -- despite a lack of evidence that wild bison have ever transmitted the disease to cattle.

But instead of killing them, wildlife officials spared this group and rounded them up to take part in a disease study.

The goal was to create a healthy herd of Yellowstone bison that could be used to repopulate the West. But finding a home for the animals has been harder than anticipated. Concerns about undocumented disease, transportation and management costs, and the general ability to properly care for the bison have left officials struggling to find a suitable option for relocating the herd from the federal quarantine facility.

Enter billionaire mogul Ted Turner, North America's largest private owner of bison with some 50,000 animals in his keep, who has offered to shelter the herd at his Flying-D Ranch outside Bozeman -- but with a catch. In return for housing, feeding and caring for the animals for five years, Turner wants to keep the majority of their offspring.

On Thursday, the head of Montana's wildlife agency issued a preliminary approval of the plan to move some or all of the quarantined bison -- 14 could go to a Wyoming state park -- to Turner's ranch early next year. An environmental study must be done first, and then the public will have 30 days to comment on the plan.

For some wildlife officials and conservationists who had hoped to see these animals flourish on public lands, sending them to Turner's ranch represents a letdown -- and, some argue, a slippery slope toward privatizing public resources.

But others argue that it's the only feasible solution, and that the alternative is slaughter. No one else has come up with the cash and a solid plan to house the bison, which still need a home, on the range or otherwise.

AN ALTERNATIVE TO SLAUGHTER

Several hundred years ago, tens of millions of American buffalo roamed the plains. But by the end of the 19th century, only about a thousand of them remained, mostly in captivity. At the low point, just 23 wild bison survived, all in Yellowstone National Park.

Today, there are roughly half a million bison in North America, but 96 percent are privately owned domestic livestock. Many of rest exist in small, intensively managed herds, unable to freely roam. Cattle DNA mixed with the bison bloodline in the early 20th century as the result of a misguided effort to create a "beefalo" with the hardiness of bison and the meat-production properties of cattle.

The untainted Yellowstone herd now numbers about 3,300, and these wild bison are vitally important for the conservation of the species. It's the largest genetically pure herd left in the country, and the only one that has remained continuously wild.

In the early 20th century, brucellosis made its way into Yellowstone's wildlife, courtesy of cattle. Today, the U.S. cattle herd is brucellosis-free, and the disease has also disappeared from most wildlife populations, save for the greater Yellowstone ecosystem.

While the actual risk of bison transmitting the disease to cattle -- and what to do about that risk -- is a subject of intense debate (conservation groups maintain that there's no evidence it has ever happened), one thing is certain: Montana's ranchers consider these iconic animals an economic threat.

If the state were to lose its brucellosis-free status, ranchers would have a harder time selling their cattle, causing problems for Montana's $1.5 billion livestock industry. That's why managing Yellowstone's booming bison herd -- whose members are leaving the park in greater numbers to search for winter and spring forage -- has become a quagmire, involving five separate state and federal agencies.

Officials spend days quibbling over minutiae such as how many animals can stand on a particular parcel of land on which specific days of the year. The agencies share responsibility for dealing with bison that "breach" the arcane boundaries drawn on the map. When that happens, the animals are slaughtered or "hazed" back into the park by men with guns on horseback and in helicopters.

Nevertheless, everyone involved agrees that the Yellowstone bison are highly important for conservation of the species. So scientists and bureaucrats began to wonder: What if you could develop a quarantine protocol that would ensure bison were free of brucellosis?

NRDC's Matt Skoglund, a wildlife advocate in the group's Livingston office, explains the plan this way: "There's lots of available suitable bison habitat, so instead of slaughtering them, what if we capture and quarantine them and then send them somewhere to reestablish a native herd?" That was the impetus for the disease study.

Brucella abortus -- the bacteria that causes brucellosis -- can sometimes produce a latent infection, which remains hidden until the animals abort their calves. That makes bison particularly frightening to cattle ranchers, who fear that even buffalo that appear to be disease-free could be secretly harboring the bacteria.

So two scientists -- one from Montana Fish, Wildlife, and Parks, and the other from USDA's Animal and Plant Health and Inspection Service -- devised a quarantine experiment.

The study involved capturing two groups of young bison that migrated across the park boundary and testing them for the bacteria. Those that tested positive for the antibodies to the bacteria -- meaning their bodies were trying to fend off infection -- were killed. Those that tested negative were brought to the pastures on the edge of Yankee Jim canyon. There, they were repeatedly tested until the females had gone through at least one pregnancy cycle of 9.5 months.

The study has largely been a success, at least as far as the quarantine is concerned. Although the disease turned up in some animals within five months of their capture, it did not appear beyond that.

To complete the study, the animals need to be monitored annually for five additional years. If their test results are negative, said Jack Rhyan, the USDA wildlife pathologist who designed the study, "then it demonstrates that quarantine could be utilized to get the bison genetics out of Yellowstone and establish other herds that are pure bison with widely diverse genetics."

In other words, it's possible to create a brucellosis-free herd that could be used to seed other parts of the West with genetically pure wild bison. This spring, 88 bison will be ready for that final phase of the study, which calls for finding a larger habitat.

"We always had our little mantra: These will go to public and tribal herds," said Rhyan, who is based in Fort Collins, Colo. "What we'd love to see is another area like the Henry Mountain region in southern Utah." There, another wild herd, relocated from Yellowstone in the 1940s, is brucellosis-free thanks to a program that tagged infected animals and let hunters pick them off.

The Henry Mountain herd is "a free-ranging herd that's hunted and treated as wildlife," said Rhyan. "That's our ideal."

SEARCHING FOR A SUITABLE HOME

That ideal met harsh reality earlier this year when Montana's wildlife agency called for proposals to relocate the quarantined bison. Only four came in.

Fort Belknap, a tribal reservation in eastern Montana, wanted the buffalo. So did Guernsey State Park in Wyoming and a consortium of zoos led by the Wildlife Conservation Society. And then there was Ted Turner.

An advisory committee made up of representatives from the five bison management agencies reviewed the proposals. Fort Belknap's was too vague, the officials decided. So was the one from the zoos. And the state park proposal was only suitable for a small number of bison -- just 14 out of the 88.

The rest, according to a near-unanimous recommendation of the committee, would go to Turner. The lone dissenting voice on the committee was USDA's Jack Rhyan, who sat in via conference call.

"Turner had the best proposal if you're just grading proposals," Rhyan said. But he felt the animals should go to Fort Belknap, in keeping with the mission to repopulate public or tribal herds.

The committee did decide to give the reservation first dibs on the next group of bison, which will be ready in the spring of 2011. But the current crop must be moved from the quarantine facility by the end of March 2010.

"The bison that have to go this spring will go to Turner," said Marty Zaluski, the state veterinarian for the Montana Department of Livestock, who served on the committee. "Then we're committing the next ones to Fort Belknap. That gives them a year and a half to get ready."

The Turner proposal called for housing the 88 bison on a 12,000-acre parcel southwest of Bozeman, where the Madison River would naturally segregate them from the rest of the 113,000-acre Flying-D ranch.

Russ Miller, general manager for Turner Enterprises, estimates that housing and monitoring the bison for five years would cost roughly $480,000. To offset those costs, the company wants to keep about 190 offspring at the end of that period. The rest would go back to the public.

Under the original Turner plan, Miller said, "They start off with 88 animals with which they can do nothing, and they end up with 150 animals that are free for distribution to wherever they determine toward the best conservation purposes."

Miller said the offspring might be kept completely separate from Turner's commercial bison, or they could be used to increase the genetic diversity of those livestock herds -- or mixed with animals from another pure bison herd that Turner owns, to augment the genes of both populations. Those decisions would be up to geneticists from Texas A&M University, he said. "We recognize the value and uniqueness of these genetics."

Zaluski, the state veterinarian, described Turner's ranch as "a temporary holding area" for the bison that will return to the public domain. "Everyone in that room agreed that the top priority is the completion of the study," he said. "We need to be able to prove we don't have Brucella hiding out in female bison. The conservation value would be negated if we couldn't finish it."

But some Montanans aren't buying it. Glenn Hockett, president of the Gallatin Wildlife Association, a local group representing hunters and conservationists, worries that letting Turner keep any of the bison amounts to the "selling of wildlife" that should belong to everyone, not just wealthy landowners.

"We've been talking about reintroducing bighorn sheep," Hockett said during a board meeting at a Bozeman bakery. "People could say, you can do the reintroduction on my land if you give me some of the offspring."

As an alternative, the group has suggested that the state house the bison on designated wildlife management areas currently used to graze cattle.

In a letter to the Casper Star-Tribune, Robert Hoskins, a Wyoming conservationist, argued that the Turner plan was illegal because the government's request for proposals required that the successful applicant agree to specific provisions -- notably, that neither the bison nor their offspring can be used for commercial purposes and that both must remain in the public domain.

In the Bozeman offices of Turner Enterprises, Miller maintained that conservation, like anything else, must be paid for. "We're fronting all the costs and assuming all of the risks," he said, calling the plan a "rational blend of conservation with capitalism."

"If conservation is solely reliant on either philanthropy or tax dollars," he said, "I don't think it's as secure as if it has some ability to pay for itself."

Until the Montana wildlife agency conducts its environmental assessment and reviews public comments, the fate of the quarantined bison remains uncertain.

"The original objective was to determine if this quarantine process is feasible for addressing some of the bison coming out of Yellowstone," said Ken McDonald, chief of wildlife for the agency. "But it's only a valid process if you have somewhere to put them. Now we have these bison we have to have a home for.

"In hindsight, that probably should have been addressed beforehand."

Stowaway Species Interactive

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

On any given day, as many as 5,000 invasive species are taking an ocean voyage via ballast water. The environmental and economic impacts can be devastating. Zebra mussels invaded the Great Lakes via ballast water in the late 1980s. To date, they've done more than $1 billion in damage by blocking intakes to power plants and disrupting aquatic food webs.

The U.S. Coast Guard proposed new rules last August designed to stop these bioinvasions. To comply, shipping companies need to adopt new technologies, such as straining out organisms with microfilters or zapping them with ultraviolet light. Above, see how species are able to spread across the globe via ballast water and the damage that some of the worst have done.

Produced by Joseph Lin based on an illustration by Arthur Mount

Decoding Smugglers

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

Worldwide sales of exotic animal products add up to $15 billion annually, a global trade that is fueled in part by the illegal trafficking of endangered species from Africa, Asia, and South America. Law enforcement officials are severely hampered by their inability to distinguish bits of cured meat or chemically treated animal skins by visual inspection. Now a research team led by Mitchell Eaton of the U.S. Geological Survey has developed a way to differentiate animal products based on slight variations in a single gene. This bodes well for future technologies that may enable on-the-spot testing to pick out, for example, a piece of bushmeat that was cut from an endangered primate as opposed to a common beefsteak.

Eaton searched markets in Africa and South America, collecting skin and blood samples from animal carcasses that he was able to visually identify by species. Back in the lab, his team compiled a database that matches commonly hunted animals -- including primates, crocodiles, and bovids -- with each species' unique genetic signature. Now mystery samples can be sent to any DNA forensics lab to be compared with Eaton's database.

Stowaway Species

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

Ships have been described as floating islands or mobile marine ecosystems. Along with cargo, they can transport animals from one part of the world to another. Sometimes these species latch onto the hull, rudder or propeller blades. But more often, they're carried along in the ballast water that ships use for balance and positioning. A single tanker may carry more than 50 million gallons of water, picking it up in a port and dumping it thousands of miles away.

In our special interactive feature, see how species are able to spread across the globe via ballast water and the damage that some of the worst have done.

Check the Label First

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

Say you want to buy the most eco-friendly lightbulb. Energy-saving compact fluorescents seem like a good choice, but which one is best? Is one manufacturer more environmentally responsible than another? The answer is probably yes, and new product labels will soon make such comparisons easy for shoppers. Gregory Norris, an industrial ecologist at Harvard University, has developed an open-source database called Earthster that evaluates products based on the raw materials used and the emissions generated. As a major funder of the project, Wal-Mart will be one of the first retailers to roll out the new system.

The Curse of the Labrador Duck

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

Nonfiction books about extinct creatures face a particular challenge in trying to bring their subjects to literary life. So authors often tell the stories of the places the animals lived and the people -- scientists and sleuths, lovers and killers -- that surrounded them. That's the approach that the Canadian ornithologist Glen Chilton takes, with mixed results, in The Curse of the Labrador Duck, which he conjured after completing a comprehensive account of the bygone duck for the Birds of North America series.

The Labrador duck, a black-and-white piebald bird with a face Chilton describes as "cute," probably bred along the Gulf of St. Lawrence and wintered as far south as Chesapeake Bay. (No nests have ever been found, and no known eggs are preserved.) It is unclear why the duck went extinct: it wasn't particularly tasty, and its habitat by then hadn't significantly shrunk, although the growth of cities certainly polluted its main food source, mollusks. The last preserved Labrador duck specimen was shot in 1875 on Long Island, and the last known bird was shot, and eaten, in Elmira, New York, in 1878. (The city was experiencing food shortages because of flooding, hence the culinary stretch.)

Chilton, intrigued, reports that he "embarked on an adventure to examine and measure every stuffed Labrador Duck specimen, no matter where it was, without exception." But "adventure" is a bit of an overstatement. Measuring taxonomic mounts, it turns out, produces only numbers. Chilton examines carcasses with magnifying lenses and calipers, but his investigation reveals only wires and odd paint schemes. (Most of his ducks were shot as trophies, not scientific specimens, and their taxidermists took wide liberties in selecting eye and bill color and deciding how much stuffing a bird's head deserves.)

The author stuffs his own narrative with historical vignettes about museum acquisitions and long asides about specimens gone missing, but he can't hide the fact that his main challenges are posed by museum bureaucracy and public-transit schedules. Still, he's an amiable writer, good with quips and one-liners. (One duck has a jaunty look on his face, "as though he were about to be fed.")

The measuring and describing of all those museum specimens, as dusty and tedious as the endeavor seems, is in fact critical to the identification of existing species and the discovery of new ones. Unfortunately, Chilton offers only a vague and meager defense: natural history collections can help us "appreciate the unity and diversity of the natural world," while judicious collecting "has helped ornithology to advance as a scientific endeavor." Nor does he put these museum specimens in the context of emerging online databases, which are breathing new life into biodiversity studies.

Chilton has tried to make the collection of basic taxonomic information amusing, and for that he deserves credit. And he successfully conveys the sense of loss at this species' extinction. But if he's going to write a book about his perambulations, he ought to reveal or learn something in the process -- about himself, the nature of obsession, the value of preserving living biodiversity, or extinction itself. After all, his seagoing ducks rub wing coverts in back rooms with passenger pigeons, great auks, Carolina parakeets, and Eskimo curlews -- surely an opportunity to discuss the common factors that contributed to their extinction (or not), the beleaguered state of wildfowl today, or current efforts to rescue them. By the time he applies his calipers to specimen number 19, out of 55 birds in 30 cities, the reader may wish there were even fewer individuals remaining.

Can Winemakers Take the Heat?

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

It's harvest time in California's Napa Valley, and the rows of vines that line the meandering Silverado Trail are laden with fat, lush clusters of grapes. Dozens of pickers, their wide-brimmed hats shielding their faces from the late-afternoon sun, fill their sacks as quickly as they can. I've always associated Napa with leisurely afternoons lingering over a glass of Cabernet, but it is these few, frenzied weeks of early fall that forge the valley's reputation as one of the world's premier wine-producing regions. This year's grapes, harvested at the peak of their flavor, will become the sought-after vintages of the future through an alchemy that fuels the area's $11 billion wine industry.

Napa owes its success to a rare climatic confluence: cool air wafts in from the Pacific Ocean and mingles with warm currents moving up from the hot and arid Central Valley, creating unique microclimates in each valley and on each hillside. Over the next century, the average temperature here could rise by as many as seven degrees Fahrenheit, making Napa as hot as present-day Fresno, 200 miles to the southeast. If that happens, some vintners may reach a point of diminishing returns, producing wines that do not stack up to today's vintages. In 2006, cabernet sauvignon grapes grown in Napa sold for more than $4,100 a ton; the same variety grown near Fresno fetched just $260 a ton -- less than a tenth of the price. As climate change threatens Napa's wine-making primacy, vintners are looking for ways to adapt. The question is how, and the answers vary.

My first stop is Opus One Winery in Oakville, where I meet with the company's CEO, David Pearson. He was one of the first members of the Napa Valley Vintners' Climate Study Task Force, formed in 2006 to help winemakers plan for the challenge of higher temperatures. Opus One's immaculate headquarters is an architectural mélange that strikes me as a cross between a Tuscan palace and the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars. Pearson and I sit down in his airy, light-filled office overlooking Opus One's sprawling estate, where 169 acres of premium grapes routinely yield vintages that sell for more than $100 a bottle. But even small fluctuations in climate can contribute to the difference between a $100 bottle and a $10 one.

Pearson tells me that his growing and processing strategies will adapt to suit the climate. "It's too early to be immediately worried," he says. "In warm years, people can grow their grapes differently."

As grapes ripen, they accumulate sugar and lose acid in roughly equal measure. Warm days and cool nights maintain this balance, but when the temperature soars, sugars dominate. The yeast that drives the fermentation process feeds on sugar, which means that ultrasweet grapes produce wines that are too high in alcohol to meet today's standards, which dictate that quality wine should contain only 12 percent to 15 percent alcohol by volume.

There are plenty of tricks for balancing finished wines, Pearson says. Alcohol can be extracted through various filtration methods. Or, he adds, "let's say you've got rugged flavor compounds in your wine because of the heat -- rugged tannins, like sandpaper. When you put egg whites in the barrel, the albumin binds to certain sediments." The excess sediments then "fall out" of the wine, resulting in a finished product with a smoother, subtler flavor. Pearson assures me that this process, called fining, is part of the wine-making canon, something that has been done by even the best European producers for hundreds of years.

Of course, it's better to have your grapes grow just right than tinker with the finished product, so Pearson has installed special nozzles on his irrigation system that mist and cool the vines when they approach critical temperatures, typically in the mid-90s. In trials conducted by one vineyard management company, the strategy reduced the temperature beneath the vine canopy by a full seven degrees.

These misters might come in handy up the road at Larkmead Vineyards, nestled in the northern end of the valley. The next morning I head over there to meet with Dan Petroski, a lanky, affable grower with a chemist's exacting knowledge of wine. When I arrive, an intern is performing test-tube assays of wine samples. Like Pearson, Petroski is a member of the climate task force, but he seems much more worried than Pearson about the fate of his prized grapes. He leads me out into Larkmead's fields to show me why.

"What happened here is what we call shatter," he says, lifting a scrim of leaves to reveal the fruits of this year's merlot crop. The grape buds on the vine are black, as shriveled as knuckles. "These aren't wonderful, juicy grapes. The vine looks decimated," he says. "That's a function of the weather."

The variations in Napa's microclimates mean that while Opus One has been doing just fine lately, Larkmead, only 11 miles to the north, has not. Extreme temperature fluctuations have hampered the normal ripening process, and Petroski's grapes are suffering. In 2007 he harvested 22.7 tons of merlot. In 2008 that number fell to 12.3 tons, and in 2009 it fell further, to 9.9 tons.

"The weather tells you what you get," he says as we walk back to his office, his dog, Sophie, trailing behind us. "Everyone is pretty much scratching their heads and saying, 'What are we dealing with?' "

Scientists are trying to figure out how Napa's mosaic of microclimates might evolve; the hypothetical scenario of whole harvests frying in the heat is far from a foregone conclusion. It's possible that gradual overall warming may actually cool some pockets of the valley as higher inland temperatures spur the formation of fog. Such changes could also alter precipitation patterns, causing a different set of problems.

Petroski is searching for his own way to adapt, and he recently began to monitor temperatures around the vineyard to determine how they affect the flavor profiles of his finished wines. "You don't want to fight the weather," he says. "You want to work with it."

The capriciousness of Napa's weather and its effect on grapes are apparent that afternoon, when I head back down the Silverado Trail to Honig Wineries in Rutherford. Although Honig is just 10 miles from Larkmead, its harvest has remained relatively robust. That leaves winemaker Kristin Belair, a willowy brunette with a deep tan, wondering just how big a threat climate change is to her business. We sit down in an air-conditioned conference room, and she gives me a crash course on Honig's harvest records for the past few years. In 2005 and 2006 there were problems -- a wet spring and extreme heat, respectively.

"That didn't affect your grape yields?" I ask.

"It didn't seem to," she says.

As we stroll out into her fields, she explains that the reason may have a lot to do with the hardy varieties she grows. "Most of what we have out here is sauvignon blanc," she says, leading me past an orderly row of trained vines. "That does pretty well in the heat." Unlike Larkmead's merlot vines, Honig's sauvignon blanc vines droop with clusters of lush, round fruit.

Even so, Belair believes in the merits of adaptation. As we pass row after row of grape-laden vines, she explains how she manages her crop to ensure optimal production. "See how these grapes are sun-dappled?" she says, pointing to the first vine in a seemingly endless row. "If your fruit is too exposed, it can burn up." But if you position your vines so that the canopy overshadows the developing fruit, as the leaves of her sauvignon blancs do, the grapes stay cool even during hot spells—as much as 15 degrees cooler than they would be in the direct sun. Belair is less inclined to cool her vines by watering them more because of the steep financial and environmental costs.

I ask Belair whether the most sensible adaptation to climate change might be to cultivate varieties known for their heat tolerance. Sauvignon blanc does well here in Napa, but what about introducing more vermentino, which is grown with great success in hotter, more arid places like Spain? Or, in theory, scientists could modify grapes to better tolerate heat or drought using genes from grapes that have such traits.

Belair is not so sure. If cabernet sauvignons and merlots disappear from the valley, or no longer taste as the purists expect them to, consumers could start to turn their noses up at Napa wines. Every adaptation strategy has its limits. In a worst-case climate scenario, Napa could warm to the point where very few grapes do well here at all. "If it gets to be 110 degrees all the time," Belair says, "I don't know what we'll do then."

NRDC and Labor

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

NRDC's David Pettit works with community and labor groups to fight air pollution in southern California.

OE: Tell us a bit about the blue green alliance.

Pettit: It used to be said that environmentalists would save a threatened mosquito at the cost of a million jobs and that unions would pave over Yosemite if they could get paid. This was always a phony dichotomy. The Blue Green Alliance embraces a number of labor unions and environmental groups, including NRDC, who believe that the green economy can provide hundreds of thousands of good jobs. Weatherizing homes and installing solar panels are jobs that can't be outsourced offshore. On a different scale, California's clean energy economy has generated $6.5 billion in venture capital in the past three years.

OE: What are some examples of work that NRDC and labor groups have done together?

Pettit: NRDC is working with a coalition of community and labor groups at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach to clean up the single biggest source of deadly diesel particulate pollution in Southern California. Together, we crafted the Ports Clean Air Action Plan, the most environmentally progressive port cleanup program in the world, and convinced both ports to adopt it. NRDC is now fighting in court to keep the trucking industry from weakening the ports' plans to clean up the fleet of 17,000 dirty, old diesel trucks that serve the ports. Several years ago, NRDC worked with community and labor groups near Los Angeles International Airport to make sure that LAX's planned expansion was environmentally friendly and provided good jobs to local residents. NRDC also supported Los Angeles Measure B, a local initiative backed by many environmental and labor groups that would have encouraged the development of rooftop solar power in Los Angeles and provided for hundreds of good-paying installation and maintenance jobs. Unfortunately the proposal was narrowly defeated in March 2009.

OE: Are there projects where NRDC and its labor friends disagree?

Pettit: There are some projects where we have to agree to disagree with our friends in the labor movement. An example would be the Orange County Toll Road, an environmentally destructive project which NRDC fought to stop but which the trade unions supported. Another, similar situation is a very recent exemption from the California Environmental Quality Act that the California legislature gave to a football stadium project in Southern California. On the other hand, NRDC supports the construction of a far-reaching mass transit system in Los Angeles, which will provide not only construction jobs but operation and maintenance jobs too. The fact that there are sometimes disagreements does not detract from our belief that we really can have it both ways: we can clean up the environment while providing for important, good-paying jobs for Americans.

A Safer Ride

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

In the summer of 1995, NRDC launched its Dump Dirty Diesels Campaign, which eventually helped reduce diesel emissions from New York City Transit's bus fleet by 97 percent. When cities across the country followed suit, the federal government took notice and adopted strict tailpipe pollution standards for new trucks, buses, farm tractors, construction equipment, and almost any other vehicle with a diesel engine. Still, the job was not complete.

In 2001 a team of NRDC scientists in California showed that pollution inside school buses continued to be a problem. According to their study, students were exposed to four to six times more noxious diesel soot than passengers in cars traveling alongside the buses. Most school buses have open crankcases directly below the cabin, which allows pollution to travel into the space where children sit.

Armed with these data, the director of NRDC's Clean Fuels and Vehicles Project, senior attorney Rich Kassel, doggedly pursued his goal: to help craft a new law -- signed by New York mayor Michael Bloomberg in October 2009 -- which requires the city to filter the crankcase exhaust of school buses. Retrofitting this one part will reduce most of the pollution inside the buses, according to Kassel, who expects other U.S. cities will adopt similar measures.

"Even in the toughest of fiscal climates, cities can take these relatively inexpensive steps to virtually eliminate a serious pollution risk for kids traveling to school," Kassel says.

Riddle of the Shells

Sharon Levy — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

An eternal wind rips across San Miguel Island, scouring stretches of open sand and bending the blackened branches of shrubs. The most far-flung of a chain of islands that dot the Santa Barbara Channel off the coast of southern California, San Miguel has drawn fishermen ever since the earliest people settled North America. This stark landscape is surrounded by a thriving submarine jungle of kelp that is prime habitat for an array of fish, shellfish, and marine mammals. For millennia, it was the best place in southern California to collect abalone, the giant mollusk that once carpeted the seafloor of the Channel Islands. Now, after decades of over-harvesting, southern California abalone populations are badly depleted, echoing a global pattern in which the bountiful ocean morphs into a sea of ghosts.

During the past decade, scientists have come to understand the extent to which overfishing has emptied the oceans. In 2003 an influential study in the journal Nature concluded that many populations of large fish had plummeted to 10 percent of their 1950 levels. The research drew on coastal marine surveys and catch data from Japanese long-lining, an intensive industrial fishing method used in all the world's oceans except the circumpolar seas. The study showed that predators such as marlin and tuna are now caught when they are relatively small; many don’t live long enough to reproduce. This grim trend is evident on coral reefs, in the deep waters of the open oceans, and in kelp forests off southern California.

The sluggish abalone may not be as charismatic as a free-roaming ocean giant like the tuna, but its plight encapsulates the human foibles that have led to devastation of marine life around the world. What had been a highly profitable abalone fishery began to crash in the late 1970s and was completely closed in 1997 to protect remnant stocks from obliteration. Now, a dozen years after the emergency closure, a group of former abalone fishermen is lobbying hard for a renewed harvest at San Miguel Island, the last, best place for the great snails in southern California.

The powerful tendency of fishermen and resource managers to take what they've seen in their own time as the natural norm is known as the shifting baseline syndrome. It allowed fishermen in the North Atlantic to over-harvest cod for centuries. Each generation accepted increasingly scattered stocks of smaller and smaller fish as the norm, until the population collapsed in the 1990s. The same syndrome explains why advocates of a renewed abalone fishery insist that the population at San Miguel is strong, while ecologists, conservationists, and now even archaeologists see it as the tattered shreds of a once plentiful stock in desperate need of protection.

Gary Davis, a marine ecologist recently retired from Channel Islands National Park, has witnessed the abalone's slide from bounty toward oblivion. When he was a kid in 1950s San Diego, abalones were so abundant that he could gather his daily sport limit of five during a single breath-hold dive off the rocky coast. In 1957, the year he took his first job as a deckhand on a sport-fishing boat, the southern California abalone fishery peaked; 2,500 metric tons of pink and red abalone were landed. At that point the abalone was being aggressively harvested by commercial divers using scuba gear, which allowed them to search for far longer and in deeper waters. As abalone populations were depleted closer to the coast, divers sailed to the more remote Channel Islands in search of more robust stocks. By 1996, the last year before the fishery was closed, the total southern California harvest had shrunk to a paltry 87 tons.

When Davis started working at Channel Islands National Park in 1980, he began counting abalone in different sections of undersea habitat. He found that numbers had plummeted compared with those recorded in earlier decades. Populations continued to decline, except in a small reserve off Anacapa Island. These data would eventually help kick-start a movement to create marine protected areas in the Channel Islands and throughout the state, an effort that now has the legal backing of California's Marine Life Protection Act. In 1997 a ban on taking all abalone south of San Francisco was imposed by emergency order of the California Fish and Game Commission; it was later written into law by the legislature. The state's Abalone Recovery and Management Plan, adopted in 2005, laid out recovery criteria, but no population in the region has yet rebounded to sustainable levels. Still, the California Abalone Association (CAA), a group of former commercial abalone divers, is pushing for renewed fishing at San Miguel.

Chris Voss, a tall man with intense blue eyes, is president of the CAA and a driving force behind its effort to create an abalone fishery co-op, a progressive model in which fishers, in return for the right to harvest in a designated area, work with state regulators to monitor and maintain the resource. Under traditional fisheries management, a quota is set for the total amount of a species that can be caught. That gives fishermen an incentive to take as much as they can as fast as they can, before their competitors get to it -- a destructive cycle known as the race to fish. CAA is working with Chris Costello, an environmental economist at the University of California, Santa Barbara. In a recent paper published in Science, Costello documented the benefits of giving each fisherman the right to a percentage of the total quota. This individual quota system can halt, and even reverse, the decline of fish stocks. Successful examples include the Alaskan halibut fishery and the abalone fishery in Tasmania, Australia. The problem with applying the idea to San Miguel is that it assumes that the abalone population there is healthy enough to sustain harvesting.

Voss has worked as a commercial fisherman since 1975, when he was 14 years old. He didn't get in on the southern California abalone fishery until 1991, when he won one of a limited number of permits in a lottery. Abalone stocks were already severely depleted by then, but that moment in time shaped his idea of what a healthy population looks like. Researchers who surveyed abalone in the 1960s and 1970s reported densities several times higher than today's. Despite this, Voss insists, based on his own observations of the shellfish and his idiosyncratic interpretation of data from government biologists, that the population at San Miguel is "phenomenally robust." For him, the state of the abalone now, a mere dozen years after emergency closure of the fishery, is an adequate measure of a healthy population.

Different players rely on very different baselines to judge the health of the abalone: Davis has had his eye on the creatures for six decades, while Voss's perspective covers less than 20 years. Todd Braje, an energetic young archaeologist at Humboldt State University, takes a longer view; he believes it may be possible to glimpse ancient abalone populations that lived as much as 12,000 years ago. "If we're going to remedy the shifting baseline syndrome," he says, "we need to look as far back in time as we can."

The arid sands of the Channel Islands hold relics of some of the earliest human inhabitants of North America. The Chumash people, once one of the world's most populous hunter-gatherer societies, left their spear points behind in Daisy Cave, a narrow sandstone cleft at the northeastern edge of San Miguel. Eroding dunes reveal an abundance of prehistoric tools, including beautiful fishhooks formed from the shells of red abalone. These hooks could be used without bait: one side, coated in the pearlescent material that lines the interior of an abalone shell, would flash underwater, acting as a lure.

The islands also reveal the remnants of ancient feasts. Fragments of sea urchin test -- the delicate domes that once encased the bodies of these tasty invertebrates -- lie scattered like bits of broken porcelain. When sunlight breaks through the clouds it brings out the gleam of abalone shells, whose meat was a staple food for the Chumash.

Combing through Chumash middens on San Miguel and the neighboring islands of Santa Rosa and Santa Cruz, Braje has analyzed shifting patterns in the size and abundance of abalone shells. His work shows that the Chumash feasted steadily on abalone for thousands of years, both devouring and coexisting with the great snails. (Part of this, of course, had to do with technological limits: prehistoric people lacked scuba gear, and many abalones would have remained beyond reach, producing larvae that could repopulate shallow areas close to shore.) Braje has studied heaps of ancient, whopper-size red abalone shells that tumble out of sand dunes like a collection of calcified ladies' hats. Such finds are scattered across several of the islands, but San Miguel holds the densest concentrations of red abalone shells.

Southern California is home to seven species of abalone, five of which have been commercially fished. Black abalones grow in the intertidal zone and are particularly vulnerable: they can be pried off the rocks by anyone willing to get wet feet. Reds and pinks live farther out, below the tide line. Together, these two species sustained the fishery for decades. Hopes for its renewal focus on the red abalone, the most resilient and widespread abalone species. Yet over much of its traditional range, populations are so depleted that the once ubiquitous creatures are hard to find. The white abalone, California's deepest-dwelling species, was once abundant off the Channel Islands, with as many as 10,000 per hectare (2.47 acres) in some stretches of rocky habitat. In the 1990s Davis supervised an intensive search for abalone using scuba divers and a manned submarine. Whites had become a rarity; he and his colleagues found fewer than two animals per hectare. The species is now listed as endangered.

To understand why high densities are vital to a population's long-term health takes some basic knowledge of abalone sex. A good-size female red abalone will pump out about four million eggs a year. But unless breeding adults live in high density on the seafloor, sperm and eggs become so dispersed that they're unlikely to connect. To achieve breeding success, abalones must generate enough larvae and juveniles to satiate all the fish and lobsters that will snap them up, with enough surviving to establish a new generation. Even where abalones are present in large numbers, they may produce viable numbers of offspring only once every four or five years. Fishery biologists didn't realize until the 1990s that nature had programmed the abalone to play reproductive roulette. Earlier regulations had set minimum size limits for harvesting. "We were removing all the large animals, and that's where the reproductive capacity lies," Davis explains. The biggest abalones produce the most abundant spawn. They also bring the highest prices. (In the last year of the legal fishery, such animals sold for $500 a dozen. Today, sizable red abalones can sell for $100 each on the black market.) In a 30-year lifespan, an animal may get four or five chances to produce offspring that live long enough to carry on the breed.

In its Abalone Recovery and Management Plan, California's Department of Fish and Game (DFG) laid out the critical numbers to be used in assessing the health of abalone populations. The guidelines relied on studies of red abalone in northern California (where only a limited sport harvest is allowed and the use of scuba gear is forbidden) and other stable stocks scattered around the globe. Studies from California, Australia, and New Zealand show that abalones need to be in dense aggregations of 6,000 to 8,000 per hectare to be sustainably fished. Once the density falls below 2,000 per hectare, reproduction essentially ceases. If the number plummets below 1,000, the abalone is unlikely to recover without active human intervention -- for example, by moving large, mature animals closer together, a strategy that showed some promise during a 1980s experiment with pink abalone from Santa Barbara, one of the southern Channel Islands. A healthy population should also have a mix of large, medium, and small animals. If an area holds large abalones but no younger ones, that's a signal of reproductive failure.

During the past three years, surveys of unprecedented thoroughness have been conducted in the waters surrounding San Miguel. Former abalone fishermen put on their diving gear and worked together with DFG biologists to collect the data. They found that red abalones at San Miguel are scattered, occurring at densities ranging from 160 to 1,600 per hectare, well below the levels needed to make a population self-sustaining. Large, impressive animals dominate, but young ones are rare: according to Davis, they are found at less than a tenth of the numbers thought to show successful growth of new generations.

Recreational divers who visit San Miguel today see the red abalone as fabulously abundant. Yet a couple of decades ago, the population there was 10 times denser. "The comparison people make with the other places they've seen in their personal experience makes San Miguel look like it's still okay," Davis says. "That's true even for people who've been involved with abalone for a long time." The big animals that so impress divers at San Miguel today represent the last remnants of a once bountiful stock.

Braje's research suggests that the chilly, nutrient-laden waters around San Miguel have long held southern California's greatest bounty of abalone; because the area is so remote and so biologically rich, it was among the last to be affected by overfishing and retains more large abalones than any other place. The prehistoric evidence tells us to expect abundant abalone at San Miguel: recovery, when it comes, should be noticed there first.

Working with several colleagues, including Paul Dayton, a noted marine ecologist at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, Braje co-authored a paper for the journal Ecological Applications that draws on an unconventional mix of ecology and archaeology. They compared patterns in the size and abundance of abalone shells in ancient middens on San Miguel, Santa Rosa, and Santa Cruz with catch records from the twentieth-century commercial fishery. The sites with the greatest abundance of ancient, outsize red abalone shells match up with the most productive locations for commercial fishers. San Miguel holds by far the greatest concentration. Braje believes that the archaeological record can help fill critical gaps in our understanding. Many marine scientists remain skeptical about how much they can learn from ancient relics, and he is the first to admit that archaeology cannot meet the detailed standards demanded in modern biological surveys. But quantitative data often extend back only a few decades, while human interactions with ecosystems have been going on for millennia.

For Braje, seeing the retrospective study of the abalone catch in a peer-reviewed ecology journal was a rewarding breakthrough. His leap beyond the traditional boundaries of archaeology is part of a broader movement that looks to the deep past to understand and restore depleted fisheries. Important clues have come, for example, from the bones and scales of great cod and sturgeon, caught hundreds of years ago on the banks of the North Atlantic, and from eighteenth-century ships' logs, which record an unimaginable abundance of sea turtles in the Caribbean and whales in the Pacific.

Braje and his colleagues found that during the commercial fishing of the twentieth century, San Miguel's waters yielded more than twice as much abalone, by weight, as Santa Rosa's or Santa Cruz's. That relative abundance appears to have held for thousands of years, regardless of shifting ocean temperatures that affected populations elsewhere in the Channel Islands. Braje suspects that the cooler waters around San Miguel and off the southern coast of Santa Rosa represent critical abalone habitat. The animals growing in this area may help to keep populations stocked farther to the east.

The take-home lesson is that San Miguel should not be used as an indicator of population health in the rest of the Channel Islands. A truer test of an abalone rebound would be an increase in density, along with a rise in the number of younger animals, farther south and east along the island chain.

That makes sense to Davis. "San Miguel is clearly a source of replenishment for a much larger region," he says. "It's at the tail end of the cold water that comes down from the north in the California Current, so it’s in the right position to serve that role."

Advocates on both sides of the debate see a lot riding on San Miguel. For commercial divers, it represents perhaps the only chance to fish for abalone again in their lifetimes. For conservationists, it is the last hope to restore the abalone's former abundance.

The abalone fishermen, Davis suggests, are like the buffalo hunters who clung to a cherished way of life after all the herds had been shot. "These guys would like to keep hunting and gathering," he says, "and I'd like to see the integrity of southern California coastal ecosystems rebuilt, so they can keep doing that." But this remains a distant goal. "We're down to the last little center of population," he says. "It's like the seed corn. Do we want to keep it, or sell it?"

Phantoms and Prey

Anthony Doerr — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

It's the middle of the night in central Idaho. Twenty miles from my house, hunters wait on wolves for the first time in decades. My two little sons sleep upstairs; I fill a mug at the kitchen sink. Outside, in the moonlight, the driveway pines seem tenuous, unrooted, as if they might start striding quietly past one another, swapping places in the night.

Today a friend drove me to the World Center for Birds of Prey outside Boise without telling me why. He showed me a female gyrfalcon, a Swainson's hawk, a harpy eagle; we watched a trained American crow take dollar bills from the outstretched hands of a half-dozen visitors and stuff them into a donation box. Then we crossed the parking lot to the collections building, where thousands of brown-speckled peregrine falcon eggs sit in drawers, each egg in its own box, each numbered and dated. Shards of eggs in nearby jars stand for the many nestlings that have been hatched and reintroduced into the wild.

Before we left, my friend opened a steel cabinet, slid out the top drawer, and showed me a passenger pigeon. It lay breast up on its wooden tray, a paper tag tied around its left ankle: "Chicago Market, 1886." Here was a species driven from the earth in a matter of decades, a species once so numerous it migrated in flocks a hundred miles long, a species we now believe constituted more than a quarter of the bird population of pre-Columbian North America.

Billions of individuals, all gone. And yet here was this one: a male with plenty of rosy cinnamon color still in his breast, his feet red, his eyeholes white with taxidermist's cotton. Even in the flat, fluorescent light he looked as if he might sit up and flap off over the bookshelves. I blinked back tears.

We count salmon at dams; we count hawks at migration bottlenecks; we conduct infrared camera surveys to count passing deer. But estimating populations of animals is brutally difficult, especially in the seas, where we aren't sure how many species might exist, let alone how many individuals there are. Lately ecologists have been fond of writing about the "shifting baseline syndrome," a theory that argues that we measure the current state of things -- the number of starlings in a town, say, or the coldness of winters -- against what we remember from when we were young. What we think is baseline wilderness, runs the argument, is the wildest place we saw when we were kids. In truth, what we experienced was only a degraded version of what our grandparents experienced, which in turn was a degraded version of their grandparents' baseline.

Earth eats the bones; present swallows past; the baseline shifts.

To know what is still here is difficult enough. To know what was once here is basically impossible. Who is left who can envision the United States with its original populations of bison, salmon, and whales? Who can imagine the Atlantic with the great auk, or the South with the ivory-billed woodpecker, or the Midwest with its billions of passenger pigeons? How many oysters filtered the waters of preindustrial New York Harbor? How many beavers stitched together the ancient wetlands of Connecticut?

And how many Rocky Mountain wolves once loped through the Idaho midnight? Now there are about 850. Tomorrow there may be a couple fewer.

Ours is a landscape aswarm with ghosts. We live in an afterworld, struggling to imagine what we've already lost, while we peer into a greenhouse future in which our grandchildren may have to prepare for cataclysmic droughts, massive human migrations from the coasts, and worldwide conflicts over freshwater.

What is sustainability? What is hope? Here is J. J. Audubon, in 1842, writing about the passenger pigeon: "When an individual is seen gliding through the woods and close to the observer, it passes like a thought, and on trying to see it again, the eye searches in vain; the bird is gone."

I think of my sons asleep upstairs. I think of that passenger pigeon, leaching his last colors into a wooden drawer. I think of the hunters, two valleys away, drowsing beside their guns, waiting for the howl.

Q & A: A More Perfect Union

Wade Graham — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Maria Elena Durazo is the executive secretary-treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO. The organization represents more than 800,000 workers in 300 unions, ranging from hotel employees to entertainment industry professionals. In recent years Durazo has become an outsize voice on issues that will shape California's economic and environmental future. The daughter of Mexican immigrants, Durazo grew up in California as one of nine siblings working in the fields. Crop-dusters frequently flew overhead, spraying insecticides as her family labored. Durazo spoke about her work with Wade Graham, whose spring 2007 OnEarth story, "Dark Side of the New Economy," looked at diesel pollution at the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

What perspective did your childhood give you about the links between labor and environmental issues?

There were times when we would get ill. Now, looking back, of course it had to be connected to all the insecticides that were used at the time. But I did not really make the connections until very recently, when a friend reminded me that it was César Chávez and the United Farm Workers union who were the first to demand restrictions on the use of pesticides. It was through unionization that the issue of environmental justice was first taken up in California. We lived it. It's very real to me.

So it makes sense that workers' health has been a prominent part of your work.

I think it's a very natural way of looking at environmental justice issues. I saw that when I went into other industries as an organizer. For example, what kind of toxic materials are housekeepers handling in the hotel industry, where they are often asked to use stronger cleaning fluids? We're trying to make those connections as we go into big union campaigns. Now we instinctively ask: Is there an environmental issue on the job? Does it affect consumers? Is there a broader community issue? Is there a moral issue, so that the clergy can be more involved? Is there an immigrants' rights issue? In order to win, we need to understand those connections.

The union movement has been steadily losing workers. Can the shift to a green economy reverse that trend?

Can the creation of green jobs and green technology by themselves reverse the trend? No. Should we take advantage of the fact that new jobs are being created by the expansion of green industries? Yes. But our work is cut out for us, because green jobs are not necessarily good-paying jobs. Unfortunately, we've seen many ways in which employers, through contracting and subcontracting, try to avoid paying workers what they deserve -- and without unionization, without the proper worker-protection standards.

How do you prevent the export of jobs because of lower labor costs overseas? For example, most solar panels and wind turbines are being made in China.

Certainly we are not going to be able to compete in the manufacture of some products. But I think, first, that there is a growing public awareness as to the use of our tax dollars. We want them to be invested in this country to rebuild our middle class. There is a lower tolerance now for saying, "Let's make it cheaper somewhere else." Second, we have the capacity in this country to make products in a quality way, and unions have a long history of apprenticeship programs that are very dedicated to quality.

Los Angeles used to be a major manufacturing area, but now it's a kind of Sunbelt rust belt. What are the chances of bringing serious manufacturing back to the city?

We just got approval for a project we think is pivotal to bringing back manufacturing along the lines of green technology: producing light-rail cars that will be used right here, including on the Gold Line extension to East L.A. [In September, an Italian company contracted with the city to build 100 light-rail cars on a 14-acre site in a blighted area in East Los Angeles. The contract is now up for bid again after the company's recent withdrawal.] A couple of decades ago, a prison was going to be built on the site. The East L.A. community rejected the prison and said they wanted something productive there. Well, it took a long time, but it's going to happen, with a green factory that will create a large number of permanent jobs as well as construction jobs.

But isn't that what we were talking about? How do you justify building rail cars in downtown Los Angeles rather than buying them from Italy -- or China, for that matter?

We need the jobs here. And producing light-rail cars for public transportation will be good for the environment. What better way of connecting the dots and making sure that the taxes paid by people who work hard every day are brought back home? If all we want is cheap, cheap, cheap, then we end up with the economy we have today, where everybody is suffering.

There's been a history of resistance to environmental regulation by companies and unions -- for instance, autoworkers resisting fuel economy standards. Has that changed?

The labor movement certainly has not moved as quickly as it should have. It has to realize that opposing regulations just for the sake of saving some jobs is not going to give us a win-win. There is a much greater awareness now of the damage to our environment, as there is in the rest of the population. We are competing with the rest of the world for jobs, and you get those jobs by looking for places where there is an overlap in the interests of unions and environmentalists. I know on the national level there are very strong green-blue alliances, with the construction unions and the steelworkers in the forefront.

I heard that the steelworkers in Los Angeles County are campaigning to organize car-wash workers.

Yes, it's a great campaign. We started with a checklist of our potential allies. Can we get the clergy? Can we get the other unions? How about the environmental issues? What kind of toxics are used in car washes? Are there any protections for the workers? Are those toxics going into the water? When you multiply the number of car washes and the number of cars in Los Angeles, what's the larger impact? So a campaign for justice for car-wash workers, when we win it, will have a much broader impact on the health of the community. I bet you the majority of us never think about what's in the cleaning fluids we use when we wash our cars, or where they're going to end up.

So it isn't necessarily the environmental community that raises the environmental concerns.

Exactly. Another good example would be the campaign to clean up air pollution from the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.

I know that one problem there was regulating the emissions of independent truck drivers who couldn't afford to buy expensive new trucks that met environmental standards.

The Teamsters' approach to organizing the truckers was completely different from previous attempts, when they just said, "How do we get them into the union?" and that was pretty much it. This time, they said, "Look, there's a real problem with these trucks. They're old or beat-up, they spew out pollutants, and 99 percent of them are owned by immigrant workers from the local community." Just recognizing the breadth of the issues immediately set us off in a different direction from the past, talking to the immigrants' rights community, then starting the conversation with environmental justice leaders.

Where do you see an especially urgent need for green-blue cooperation in California?

The one we started with: migrant farmworkers and the growing of food. Progress in that industry has been too slow. Part of that may be that the farmworkers' union is a very, very poor union. And other efforts at reforming agriculture have been too slow to recognize the connection with the workers. Instead, they start by saying the food has to be organically grown, and that's about it. There's got to be a deeper understanding that without the workers at the table on these environmental justice issues, you can go around and around without solving the problem.

Mystery Non-Meats

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

Going vegetarian may be great for your health and the environment, but one meat substitute may not help: Quorn. In September the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), a nonprofit advocacy group, sued the faux-meat manufacturer on behalf of a woman who experienced vomiting and other gastrointestinal symptoms after eating Quorn Chik'n Patties. The main ingredient in Quorn, Fusarium venenatum, is a filamentous mold that CSPI says has caused allergic reactions in more than 4 percent of Quorn consumers. Products made from the stuff should be labeled accordingly, the group says. Perhaps the fungus’s name, which derives from the Latin word for "poison," says it all.

The Big Burn

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

To those of us who inhabit the western landscape, the Great Burn of 1910 is not history so much as it was the spark for a debate that continues to this day. Timothy Egan, a westerner himself, gets this, and his understanding greatly enlivens his new book, The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire That Saved America. He chronicles one of North America's biggest wildfires ever, an epic burn that in just a couple of days swept through three million acres -- an area larger than some eastern states -- in northern Idaho and northwestern Montana.

The central tension of the book divides East from West. The Harvard-educated Knickerbocker Theodore Roosevelt and his Yalie sidekick, Gifford Pinchot, the first head of the U.S. Forest Service, both loved the West and traveled extensively in it. That affection eventually led to their setting aside vast tracts of public lands. And yet they failed to comprehend that the forces that shaped, and still shape, these lands are untamable, unlike in the East. They especially failed to comprehend the restorative role of wildfires, which open new opportunities for plants and animals while limiting the destructiveness of fires to come.

Pinchot himself felt that man at the dawn of the twentieth century was ready to command the evil of fire. He was wrong about both "command" and "evil," but still, an estimated 85 people -- most of them firefighters -- died senselessly in 1910 trying to prove the point. People still die for much the same reason.

The riveting part of this telling is in the detail, which Egan attends to with artful reporterly chops. His command of detail allows the unimaginable sweep of this blaze to slowly sink in, just as we come to appreciate the unimaginable sweep of Roosevelt's ideas and influence on the West.

We also come to understand that the region was not a nice place. We learn, for instance, the ratio of whores to men (1:3) in the tiny town of Taft, Montana; the number of barrels of beer on hand in the Sunset Brewery in Wallace, Idaho; and the particular obstreperousness of two senators from the region, Idaho's Weldon Heyburn and Montana's ultra-corrupt William A. Clark. These characters harass, bait, castigate, sabotage, and, in the end, lean on the long arm of the federal government, much as similar characters do to this day in the welfare West.

More important is Egan's understanding that his story is not over. Fire still forms our landscape and our people. It is the best evidence we have that the landscape of the West resists domestication, despite all efforts.

The vast scope of the 1910 fire shocked the nation, and the Forest Service embarked on a policy of putting out every fire. To a degree the plan worked, only to load our forests with too many trees, which our warming climate will be more than willing to burn. Repeating the horror of 1910 is not only possible but likely, some say inevitable, on those very acres, some of them visible from my office window in Missoula.

Indeed, Egan seems too gentle on Pinchot for his role not only in fire policy but in much of what ails public lands policy today. His most egregious offense was a public, petty, and ego-poisoned campaign against the Department of the Interior during the New Deal. Egan also could have traced a line of thinking he initially follows, but subsequently drops, by describing the evolution of wilderness fire policy, which recognizes the restorative role of fire in western ecosystems and allows that force of nature to fulfill its promise. This is the best example of the Forest Service's getting it right. Stephen Pyne's 2008 book on the same subject, Year of the Fires, more thoroughly follows this lead.

Nonetheless, The Big Burn is a story well told and a case well made. Pinchot and Roosevelt may have loved the West and may have meant well, but they were visitors who did not remain. It has taken more than 100 years of living with this landscape to begin finally to understand what Native Americans and some early European settlers to the West knew instinctively: fire belongs here.

Letters from Our Readers: Winter 2010

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

Auto Abstinence

I heartily applaud Thomas Mallon for giving up driving, and for doing so decades ahead of the curve. But I was disappointed that his essay, "The Day I Hit the Brakes" (Fall 2009), discounted the benefit by quoting Chris Goodall on how it takes more carbon to produce food calories for walking than a car produces by driving. The solution isn't to just stay home, he adds, because, quoting me, "the average home pollutes more than the average car." The solution I suggest isn't to avoid staying home; it's simply to stop wasting so much energy there. My Carbon Footprint Calculator gives the details: michaelbluejay.com/carboncalc

Michael Bluejay
Austin, Texas

Thomas Mallon responds: My inferences and frustrations about the seeming trade-offs were meant to be more comic than strictly literal. I'm all for walking, and all for freedom of choice when it comes to staying home or going out. (Same when it comes to having children or eating meat.) Like most people, I could do better in just about everything.

I Can't Bear It

Your article "A Dream of Bears," by Rick Bass (Fall 2009), made me cry. What a beautiful glimpse of life in the Pyrenees, and what a sad view of the plight of their bears!

Elizabeth Buchen
Santa Fe, New Mexico

Ivy League

Covering vertical walls with live greens seems like a good - and certainly creative - idea, but "Climbing the Walls", doesn't say anything about how it is done. Is there more information?

posted online by Steven Leighton

The editors respond: You can probably find answers to all your questions at the artist Patrick Blanc's Vertical Garden Web site: verticalgardenpatrickblanc.com

Artificial Landscape

I read "Power Up That Tree," by Sarah Parsons (Fall 2009), with puzzlement and mild disapproval. Making clean energy is already a challenge; designing these generators to look like shrubbery only increases their expense. Engineers, environmentalists, and artists should work together to make clean energy generators that are efficient, aesthetically pleasing, and appropriately sited. We have gotten used to many man-made devices plunked down in nature. Some of them even look attractive to us: sports cars, churches, the Golden Gate Bridge. Wind turbines dot the landscape in central New York, where I live. Tall and majestic, they emerge unexpectedly from behind nearby hills as I'm driving. Small, distant groups of them look like daffodils in casual, naturalized plantings. I find them inspiring to look at and hope that a new aesthetic sense will allow everyone to welcome well-designed, appropriate technology into their backyards.

Susanne Farrington
Hamilton, New York

Green Work

In "Jobs That Help Ohio—and the Rest of the Planet" (Fall 2009), Frances Beinecke makes a good start. I'm most concerned with southern Appalachia, where coal is the only economic engine driving the workforce, but is so destructive that it is entirely unsustainable. Developing green jobs there is vital not only to the local economy but to the larger economy as well. We need to develop models that take into account local sustainability initiatives and are ecologically sensitive. In my mind, this is the only viable alternative for the future.

posted online by Stephen McGuire

Redrawing the American City

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

On a warm, sunny day in July, I took a ride to the top of the Sears Tower in Chicago. By coincidence, it happened to be just a few days after the city's most distinctive landmark was officially renamed. It's now called the Willis Tower, for a London-based insurance company that acquired the naming rights. I had come to Chicago to contemplate urban sprawl, so the timing seemed symbolic: Sears began to lay plans for the tower in the 1960s and built it in the early 1970s, back when major corporations still saw our historic city centers as the real seats of power. But that would change, and by 1989 Sears was planning to build a sprawling, 786-acre office park some 33 miles northwest of downtown, in a suburb called Hoffman Estates.

Hoffman Estates did not exist at all until 1954, when the father-and-son team of Sam and Jack Hoffman bought a 160-acre farm in rural Cook County and subdivided it into half-acre lots, on which they built hundreds of modest, single-family homes. Their timing was excellent. The federal government had just begun a 79-mile extension of Interstate 90 from Chicago's O'Hare airport to Rockford, Illinois, passing right by their new plots. The tollway opened in 1958, the same year that O'Hare's international terminal opened, kicking off a multiyear expansion project that would turn a tiny military airstrip into the world's busiest airport.

In 1959 the community's residents, then numbering 8,000, voted to incorporate as Hoffman Estates, and after that the Hoffmans kept on building, mass-producing affordable homes for first-time buyers, slapping up as many as four a day. Within 10 years the population of the town had nearly tripled. Today it has some 53,000 residents plus its corporate citizens, which include not only Sears but also AT&T, GE Capital, Siemens Medical Systems, and Mary Kay cosmetics. Along the way, Hoffman Estates sprouted all the trappings of a full-fledged suburban town: a shopping mall (built in 1971), eight major hotel chains, and a sports and recreation complex, the Sears Center (built in 2006), which seats 11,000 and is home to the Chicago Bliss of the Lingerie Football League (women in bikinis playing football) and the Xtreme Soccer League's Chicago Slaughter.

And so goes the story of sprawl in America.

But the point is not to vilify the Hoffmans or their estates. Across the nation, everyone was up to the same game. Our homes and stores, many of which had been compact and concentrated in cities and villages, were streaming out into subdivisions and malls, each one farther out in the cornfields than the last. Our offices moved out too: between 1970 and the mid-1990s, the proportion of commercial office space located in suburbia jumped from one-quarter to two-thirds. During those years America also gave birth to the big-box store, the indoor shopping mall, and the McMansion. Since the close of World War II, the amount of land devoted to living and shopping in this nation has more than doubled on a per capita basis.

In the process, the automobile became an indispensable part of accomplishing a day's work and play: between 1970 and 1990, personal car use increased twofold. By the century's end, American mothers were spending at least an hour of each day behind the wheel, spread out over five or more trips. Researchers at the Texas Transportation Institute found that in 2004, the time we spent stuck in traffic cost us $63 billion in lost productivity and wasted fuel.

Meanwhile, sprawl was stoking another, distinctly twenty-first- century problem: global warming. The urge to supersize our new suburban homes, offices, schools, and shops led to ballooning energy consumption: indoor malls, superstores, and mega-mansions have far more space to heat, cool, light, and power up than the small downtown shops and apartments back in the city. The new roads we built had no sidewalks, and there was no mass transit; the only way to get to and fro was the family car. One of the greatest obstacles we now face in curbing greenhouse gas emissions is that our vehicle miles traveled, or VMT, are projected to grow at a rate that outstrips our ability to compensate through improved auto efficiency.

There is an antidote. It's called smart growth, and it is everything that sprawl is not. Smart growth is in some ways a lesson in recycling writ large. In this case it's not plastic that gets a new life but the old infrastructure and buildings that we have, in many cases, allowed to fall into disrepair. Urban renewal is part of that equation, but it also means giving the suburb a face-lift, adding sidewalks, bike lanes and racks, buses, and commuter trains, making it possible to leave the car keys at home. Following the logic of smart growth, when we build new we build in, not out: office buildings, homes, and stores go in the spaces that exist within the areas we've already developed, not out on the fringe where they gobble up farmland and countryside. This makes it possible for more people to utilize the infrastructure that currently exists; we spend taxpayer dollars to keep it in working order, rather than build anew. Smart growth is all about efficiency.

But how, exactly, do we apply these principles to a giant, snarled metropolis like Chicago? On a clear day you can see for 50 miles from the sky deck of the Willis Tower, a vista that encompasses nearly all of Chicagoland, the 4,071-square-mile metropolitan region that includes 284 municipalities and seven counties, all the way to Indiana and Wisconsin. The view contains some depressing reminders of why so many of us fled to suburbia in the first place. Things were broken. Crime, poverty, and the loss of industrial jobs left many cities in tatters. From the top of the Willis Tower, the remains of that reality are in full view in the empty rail yards and defunct train bridges that lie to the south.

But the new future is visible too. Between the tower and Lake Michigan, patches of green emerge among the skyscrapers-the city's new Millennium Park, a leafy plaza where city dwellers can dine at the Park Grill restaurant, catch a concert at the Pritzker Pavilion, stroll among white oak and flowering cherry trees, or picnic in a quiet spot near the water. What's interesting about the park is where it was built: atop a century-old rail yard that still functions as a commuter and city transit terminal. In 1998 city planners decided that this was a good location to build in, putting places for play a stone's throw from the places where Chicagoans work, which are increasingly where they live, too.

Chicago's urban planners have always had the sense of standing on the shoulders of giants. After all, this was the home of the architect Daniel Burnham, creator of the vaunted White City, site of the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition, as well as author of the visionary 1909 Plan of Chicago, which Chicagoans feted on its 100th birthday this past year. "Make no small plans," Burnham famously said. Groups like the Chicago Metropolitan Agency for Planning (CMAP) and the civic-minded business organization Chicago Metropolis 2020 have set themselves a correspondingly ambitious goal. They understand that to accommodate the 2.8 million people expected to join Chicagoland's 9.4 million residents by 2040, they will need to reverse sprawl and make creative use of the existing infrastructure, whether it's in newer subdivisions or run-down inner-city neighborhoods. What may appear at first to be evidence of urban blight -- empty factories, abandoned railroads, deteriorating housing stock -- is also a huge potential asset, and that is true not only of Chicago but also of most American cities.

I traveled back and forth across Chicagoland, covering hundreds of miles by train, by car, and on foot, in search of places that reveal how these ideas might actually work. Three very different communities stood out: Prairie Crossing, an eco-minded development out on the suburban fringe; Blue Island, a down-and-out blue-collar suburb in the region's industrial wasteland; and West Garfield Park, a poor and predominantly black neighborhood on the West Side of Chicago. Each one has laid plans for some strategic improvements, based on a simple principle: always begin with the stuff you've already got.

PRAIRIE CROSSING

In the northwestern corner of Chicagoland, some 20 miles north of Hoffman Estates, lies the community of Prairie Crossing. Getting here on the Metra commuter train from downtown Chicago takes about an hour and 20 minutes. City folk refer to the area as "the country," but when I get there, I find that working farms and forest preserves are outnumbered by roadside mini-marts, strip malls, and midcentury subdivisions.

Back in the early 1970s, sprawl reached the doorstep of the Ranney family in Grayslake, Illinois: a 1,600-home subdivision was being planned on the site of what was then a 677-acre farm. Alarmed by the rate at which farmland was disappearing, George Ranney and his uncle, Gaylord Donnelley, rounded up the neighbors -- farmers, owners of country estates, people who cared about preserving agricultural and wild lands -- to stop the development. It worked, and they eventually bought the site themselves. But that led to a new problem: no government agency wanted to buy and conserve the land (one county official thought it might make a good landfill), leaving them with what was then a $5 million property. So they began drafting plans to develop it themselves. But they would not create the usual sort of housing subdivision. They would build a community that stood in opposition to suburban sprawl, one with a conservation ethic, environmental protections, and agricultural stewardship at its core.

The first of Prairie Crossing's 359 single-family homes went up in 1994, built in accordance with the Environmental Protection Agency's Building America energy-efficiency standards. This was before the advent of LEED ratings, the now ubiquitous system established by the U.S. Green Building Council and the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC). The development's traditional farmhouses are rendered in Crayola's most tasteful, grown-up hues -- burnt sienna, goldenrod, forest green -- and arranged neatly around village greens and along small culs-de-sac on lots of about one-third of an acre. They use less than half as much energy as an average home of comparable size. The vast majority of the original parcel is set aside as farmland and permanent open space, which residents and visitors can explore on a 10-mile network of trails suitable for walking, running, biking, and horseback riding.

In 1995 Ranney hired Mike Sands, who was then managing director of the Rodale Institute, a nonprofit organic farming research and advocacy group based in Pennsylvania. Sands planned a series of organic farms on the 677-acre parcel, including one 40-acre commercial farm that generates about $400,000 in revenue a year. He has graying, curly hair, a husky build, and an always-on-the-go nature, which is immediately apparent as he takes me on a bike tour to see Prairie Crossing's native plantings. He points out a series of shallow ditches, or swales, that channel the water that runs off roads, rooftops, and driveways and filter it through the soil and plant roots. The water in turn feeds the wetlands that surround Lake Aldo Leopold, named for the Midwest's most famous twentieth-century conservationist. All of this is part of Sands's pioneering plan to preserve green space and lessen the burden on local stormwater management systems, which require a lot of energy and are nearing maximum capacity in many American cities and towns. The strategy, known as green infrastructure, has since been adapted to suit the needs of countless locales, from downtown Chicago to New York City and beyond.

Leaving Sands, I pedal over to the latest phase of Prairie Crossing's development -- Station Square, a cluster of bold yellow and red low-rise buildings that surround a nascent town square. As I approach, the single-family homes start getting closer together, though they are no less quaint, with flowering yards and American flags flapping in the breeze. I feel slightly dazed by the deliberateness of it all, as if I've been beamed down onto the set of Jim Carrey's comedy The Truman Show, which was filmed in a real-life development called Seaside in Walton County, Florida. Built 13 years before Prairie Crossing, Seaside is widely regarded as the first master-planned New Urbanist community. As the name suggests, New Urbanism's goal is to transplant desirable urban qualities -- compact dwellings in close proximity to shopping and services -- into a new setting.

Smart growth embraces those principles and adds an essential ingredient: recycling elements of the existing built environment. With its condominium residences, shops, and train access, Station Square is an attempt to fill in the missing pieces of a functional, walkable, quasi-urban environment. Those attributes earned Station Square a spot in the pilot phase of LEED for Neighborhood Development (LEED-ND), which scores smart growth developments on criteria that include creating density; making use of existing infrastructure and transportation networks; intermingling residential and commercial spaces to provide walkable access to goods, services, and entertainment; and reducing energy consumption. Where before there had been an empty parcel of land between Prairie Crossing's single-family homes and the Metra train lines, a shiny new "downtown" has been born. Unfortunately, the dragging economy has meant a slow start for Station Square. Many businesses have closed during the past year, and I walk by empty storefronts that look too new to have already seen tenants come and go.

I eventually come upon Paper Stories, which Kelly Maron, one of the owners, describes as "an eco-friendly paper boutique and work space" selling high-end stationery. Through the floor-to-ceiling windows I can see a printing press, a hulking antique built in 1926 by Chandler & Price, which Maron affectionately calls Chandy P., or sometimes just "the behemoth."

Maron, a former high school art teacher with a cherubic face and retro horn-rimmed glasses, is in the process of relocating her work and her home to Prairie Crossing. Step one was to open the shop. Step two is to sell the house in nearby Des Plaines, Illinois, which involves some finger-crossing for the real estate market to pick up. Step three: buy a small, single-family home in Prairie Crossing. What she hopes to find here is a blend of the everything-at-your-fingertips life she loves about the city with the affordability of the suburbs and easy access to open space. A downtown area more compact, walkable, and culturally diverse than the suburbs of a generation ago, combined with immediate access to two of Chicago's commuter rail lines, should give Maron everything she is looking for -- and all without using her car.

Maron's landlord is Ben Ranney, the principal of the Chicago-based green development company Terra Firma and the son of George and Vicki Ranney. Terra Firma is the primary developer for Station Square, and Ranney also hopes to develop vacant parcels of land immediately adjacent to the train station.

Most of the retail spaces opened in 2007, and all but one of the dozen shops quickly filled with businesses offering the types of goods and services that you might need after hopping off the train at the end of the workday or on the weekend: a café, a bookstore, a children's toy store, a yoga studio, and a knitting shop.

Maron and her business partner, Tami Rasmussen, who has her own line of stationery, are precisely the sort of tenants Ben Ranney wants. They don't just sell stuff; they also enrich the community by offering classes and workshops in their studio. The knitting shop next door does the same. To get the right mix, Ranney says he's prepared to make economic concessions. The nursery school, for example, cannot pay full market rent, but it provides the kind of service that a real village ought to offer.

The downturn in the economy is only one obstacle. Looking south, across the main road that borders Station Square, the plot of land between the two Metra rail lines sits vacant. Although it's owned by Prairie Crossing's developers, it lies outside Grayslake in the village of Libertyville and is not zoned for the dense, multipurpose development that makes for a bustling center of pedestrian activity. That's what Terra Firma needs to fully connect the community's fledgling downtown with the train station. A shift on Libertyville's zoning board might change that, but for now only retail and commercial use is allowed. If Terra Firma wants to build the smart growth way, mixing residential and retail, the land next to the train station will have to wait.

BLUE ISLAND

On the southern edge of Chicago, a very different sort of community has latched on to the idea of smart growth as a ticket to economic renewal. Blue Island, a city of 24,200 concentrated in just 4.5 square miles, straddles several of the region's oldest rail lines. It takes only 24 minutes to get here on the Rock Island Line from downtown Chicago. Almost before I know it I'm scrambling to get off the train at the Vermont Street station, which was built in 1868 when Blue Island was little more than a collection of brickyards and a smattering of inns and taverns frequented by westward travelers.

Over time the brickyards made way for the steel industry and the railroads, and for decades the steel boom kept the economy of Chicago's southern suburbs afloat. As most of the steel mills closed in the 1980s, so did the related metal processing facilities. Blue Island was left with a skilled manufacturing workforce but not enough manufacturing jobs to go around. Today the industrial infrastructure remains intact: there are five freight rail lines, an intermodal freight terminal where containers are switched from train to barge or truck, and the Calumet-Sag Channel, which offers access to the Mississippi River. Yet it is all grossly underutilized.

Those are the very conditions that smart growth advocates like: the means for getting both people and goods off the roads and onto more efficient modes of transportation that are just waiting to be put to use again. There are no new train tracks to make way for: they've been here for more than 100 years. The story of smart growth in Chicagoland will depend on rejuvenating places like Blue Island. If businesses can locate here, close to downtown, where transportation is plentiful, energy-efficient, and cost-effective, they won't need to migrate to the suburban fringe, where land is cheap but the costs of sprawl and inefficient transportation are high.

City planner Jodi Prout has a strategy for Blue Island to reinvent itself as an appealing place to live and work, a plan that would carefully reconfigure its built environment to put the pieces of everyday life in close proximity to one another. In her small office in City Hall, she unfurls maps and site plans. One shows the area around the Vermont Street station, where I'd been standing less than an hour earlier.

"It's a little crazy down there," Prout says, pointing to the spot where I'd hopped off the train. "There are all these businesses, and it's hard to figure out what to do." Her fingers flutter across the paper as she points to what is currently there (parking lots, a metal scrap yard, a machine shop, a cabinet maker, and a lamb processing plant) and describes what she would like to see in its place (shops, cafés, retail services, rental apartments, and condominiums). The challenge is to make Blue Island a place where new people and new businesses want to be without squelching the commercial operations that already exist. Move this here and that could go up there, and here we'd put the sorts of things that might make you want to hang around for a while, she says, resting her index finger near the spot where a lumber yard and the lamb processor now stand.

Among the many obstacles Prout will have to overcome is zoning. For the past 100 years, our zoning laws have offered a perverse incentive for sprawl. While it may seem absurd today to have laws that prevent apartments from being built on top of shops and cafés, they once made sense; our commercial businesses and urban problems have changed dramatically since Upton Sinclair wrote The Jungle about the horrors of Chicago's stockyards.

"There were very real concerns in the early twentieth century, big problems with respect to crowding in urban areas. But crowding and density are two very different things," says Geoff Anderson, who helped start the Smart Growth Program at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the mid-1990s and is now director of Smart Growth America, a nonprofit advocacy organization. A century ago, residential and commercial development were physically segregated, he says, because "crowding led to sanitation issues, disease-promoting conditions. And there was a real danger of property values decreasing if someone set up a slaughterhouse next door. But commercial can apply to a slaughterhouse or a local pub -- there is no distinction made -- even though one is a hazard and the other is an amenity."

Prout started making an inventory of Blue Island's businesses a few years ago with the help of a Web-based mapping program called Full Circle. Devised by CMAP (the regional planning agency), it uses wireless GIS-enabled devices to collect data on the types of businesses that exist and where they're located relative to one another, to vacant storefronts, and to people who live and work nearby. This has allowed Prout to identify the sorts of businesses that the community needs as well as where, ideally, they should go. Community input and support will be vital, especially when it comes time to work with the city council on zoning changes.

"People don't necessarily need to know they're involved in smart growth," Prout says. "That's a label." The key, she explains, is to demonstrate a project's cost-saving benefits, health and environmental benefits, and cultural benefits. The blueprints for Blue Island's transformation were drawn up by the Center for Neighborhood Technology, a "think and do" tank that identified the city as a prime location for transportation-centered redevelopment. Now that Prout has her priorities in order, she's working to facilitate the relocation of industrial plants that currently sit where a mix of residential buildings, shops, and services ought to go. Then she can begin pushing for sidewalks and trees on the streets that connect the train station with Blue Island's historic downtown.

A perfect location for manufacturing or assembly plants would be an old landfill on the north side of town, sandwiched between the highway and the train tracks. Cargo trains already pass through, but mostly they "have little to do with the city," Prout says, "other than sitting and blocking traffic." Moving Vermont Street's industrial businesses here would put them just as close to the freight trains as they are now, and the workers who travel by commuter train would be able to catch a shuttle bus for a five-minute ride from the rail stop -- or walk, if they chose to.

The landfill has become something of an obsession for Prout. She's spent the past several years working with the EPA and applying for grant money from the agency to clean up the site, and she is now overseeing the remediation herself while marketing the spot to potential businesses. For years, nobody wanted to build on top of abandoned industrial sites, or brownfields, since that meant inheriting financial liability for whatever mess was lying beneath the ground after decades of scarcely regulated operations. But despite the cost of remediation, Prout sees brownfields as an asset. Rising energy costs and concern over global warming, as well as the time and money lost by putting goods on trucks that travel on ever more clogged roadways, are making fringe locations less appealing.

Prout says that green businesses have so far shown the most interest, owing in no small part to Chicago's efforts to establish itself as something of a green mecca. Interested parties include a wind energy company, a composting company, and a waste-to-energy plasma facility. Already Christy Webber Landscapes, a company that builds many of Chicago's green roofs, has set up shop on 119th Street, close to the landfill on the Blue Island side of the city line. And Blue Island is rather proud of that.

WEST GARFIELD PARK

Relics of a city that grew up tough and fast are scattered across Chicagoland, and though they may give the appearance of despair and desolation, they are also, depending on your perspective, building blocks. That's precisely what I find when I visit a neighborhood even more down on its luck than Blue Island: West Garfield Park, in the heart of Chicago's West Side, where crime, drugs, poverty, unemployment, and failing public schools are far more apparent than any vision of smart growth.

And yet in recent years developers have begun to eye blighted neighborhoods like this because of their built-in assets: they're close to downtown; subways and elevated trains make for a speedy commute to the Loop, Chicago's central business district; and there's plenty of vacant land for new buildings. Until the recession hit, gentrification was beginning to touch places like West Garfield Park, with newly renovated apartments replacing derelict ones and rents rising accordingly. Its neighbor, East Garfield Park, was even named to BusinessWeek's list of America's top up-and-coming neighborhoods for 2007. The problem is that urban renewal often disrupts existing urban communities. Displacement of low-income residents is more than just an obstacle along the path to social equity, though that is certainly reason enough to care. Every person relocated from an "inner" to an "outer" neighborhood only accentuates the problems that smart growth advocates are trying to reverse. A critical element of their work, then, is to make inner cities function for the people who live there now, not just for the newcomers they hope to attract.

The way to fit West Garfield Park into Chicagoland's smarter, more efficient future is not to bring in new condos and fancy stores like Prairie Crossing's Paper Stories, or to look for a new residential-industrial-commercial mix, as Blue Island is doing. It comes down to jobs and affordable housing that will keep people close to transit and other services. For this, West Garfield turns to the likes of Kresta Randolph.

Randolph, who has lived her entire life on the West Side, is a social worker and employment coordinator at Bethel New Life, a faith-based nonprofit group well known in Chicago for its pioneering community development work. She was born in 1971, just three years after the riots that broke out following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. left her family's neighborhood in flames. She still remembers playing in Garfield Park as a child, catching fish at the lily pond with her older brother. Later, she recalls, the drinking fountains stopped spouting water and the flowerbeds began to disappear. Today Randolph lives in the leafy and historic suburb of Oak Park, where her three children have safe streets to walk and play in and the schools provide proper care for her middle child, a 13-year-old daughter who has learning disabilities. If West Garfield had those things, she says, she'd gladly move back. But right now that still seems pretty far off.

On a Monday morning in July, I find Randolph standing next to a printer at the back of a small classroom in the Bethel Center, surrounded by six teenagers from the neighborhood. They are part of a city-sponsored program that helps young adults become peer mentors, and today they are learning how to find jobs for friends and family members. Randolph peppers the kids with questions as documents spool off the printer.

"Who has hospitals? Shopping centers and department stores? Restaurants?"

The skylit room is clean and bright, with an interior glass wall that looks out over office cubicles and windows that face Pulaski Road, where the Green Line stops. The building itself, which is LEED-certified, was built in 2005 by Bethel New Life on a plot of vacant land -- a brownfield -- that it bought from the city. There are solar panels on the roof, and the second-floor employment center has direct access to the elevated platform at the Pulaski station. At street level the building houses other neighborhood services: a local savings bank and a government-funded child care center, as well as a Subway sandwich shop. In 2006 the EPA honored the city of Chicago, which helped finance the building, with its National Award for Smart Growth Achievement, praising the center as "the anchor for a transit-oriented development and a key step in the revitalization of the West Garfield Park neighborhood."

Since the employment center opened in 1985, it has helped some 7,000 area residents find jobs, some for the first time in their lives. That number includes not just teenagers and young adults, but also ex-offenders like Kenneth James and single mothers like Shanel Peterson, whose hours as a cashier were cut at Bed Bath & Beyond. Thanks to Randolph, both found full-time jobs with benefits at American MediConnect, a call center for the health care industry. Peterson has a good track record after several months with the company, Randolph tells me proudly, and James has moved on to a higher paying job.

"For a single mom, here's an opportunity to live with your four kids, even on minimum wage at $8.75 an hour. But to do that, she needs to be close to transit," Randolph says. American MediConnect's office is about to be moved downtown, and Peterson, who works the second shift, says she'll be able to take the Green Line to work rather than spending money on gas or waiting for an unreliable bus.

Randolph runs a job-skills orientation session once a month. Some people find the employment center through flyers posted around the neighborhood, some through probation officers, and some, like Peterson, just get off the train, look up, and see the sign.

Randolph, a fashionably dressed woman with carefully applied eyeliner and spiraling curls that shine in the sunlight, gives me a no-bull explanation of how job hunting works. There's more to it than learning professional skills or finding the job itself. Just as important is making sure that getting to and from work is possible and affordable.

"These are desperate times," she says. "I'm regularly telling people that they may have to commute for an hour and a half on public transportation. It may be that the job is in the suburbs and they have to take four buses to get there." That same commute might be faster by car, but car ownership shouldn't have to be a prerequisite for finding a good job. "I also have to think about what their commute will be like when it's cold outside," she adds. "I need to be sure that all of the pieces are in place."

Randolph is always on the lookout for new employers, introducing herself as a reliable third-party verifier for a company's hiring needs. She recently started to compile a list of potential employers who offer entry-level green jobs, such as energy-efficiency retrofitting, because she thinks they may be open to hiring ex-offenders. The list now includes 25 companies. "I think they'll be hot jobs for the next several years," she says. "Changing out the lightbulbs, disposing of waste properly."

In a nearby classroom, students are returning to their computers, preparing to share the fruits of the morning's labor. Randolph bounds in and claps her hands. She smiles at a petite 17-year-old named Brittany Delaney and asks brightly, "Who've you got a job for, your BFF?"

Yes, a friend, Delaney replies.

What's the job? Cashier at an AMC movie theater.

Where's it located? Downtown on Michigan Avenue.

Where's your friend live? K-Town [a neighborhood just south of West Garfield].

What would her hours be like? Could she take public transportation? Would that be safe? Yes. She'd get out at 9. That would be safe.

Good, Randolph says. She should apply for that job today, not tomorrow, when it could be gone. You see an opportunity, you take it.

After the students file out for lunch, our conversation shifts back to Kenneth James and Shanel Peterson. What worries Randolph is how to keep such people in the neighborhood. How long until the $600-a-month apartments give way to new condos and more locals are forced out? When that happens, she says, "I have no idea where they're going."

No one does. We're not very good at figuring out where people drift off to, but when the goal is to promote livability, diversity, and comfortable density in cities, displacing people from neighborhoods that are already compact and efficient makes no sense. Which is why Bethel's efforts to bring affordable housing, good schools, and other community services to West Garfield Park is such an important ingredient in creating a more sustainable Chicagoland.

CONNECTING THE DOTS

The communities I visited face a variety of challenges: a tough job market, antiquated zoning laws, our continuing attachment to the automobile. Even more challenging is connecting the dots between these places, and between them and the rest of Chicagoland's independent cities and suburbs. Making these deliberate, functional connections is likely to require alternative transportation options that don't exist in most American towns. In Chicago, walking and biking long distances in the dead of winter simply won't work, and the city's sprawling suburban communities and office parks are not well served by a regional rail network that was designed to meet nineteenth-century needs. If you have to travel from one suburb to the next, what happens if they aren't both on the same line? Are you prepared to go into the city center first?

That's where state and regional transportation agencies need to enter the picture, with services such as express buses using dedicated lanes, known as bus rapid transit, which are more flexible, less expensive, and faster to implement than new rail transit [see "Hop a Bus to the Future," this issue]. In places like Prairie Crossing, which lie in the midst of suburban regions that are home to many corporate office parks, individual companies have begun to play a role by running shuttle buses to commuter rail stops, cutting their employees' travel costs and reducing personal car use.

But reversing the economic incentives that led to sprawl is more complex. It still isn't universally understood that undeveloped land on the suburban fringe is not as cheap as it appears. Reversing sprawl will require a patchwork of solutions at every level of government.

Some of Chicago's solutions will come from CMAP, the regional planning agency, backed by Chicago Metropolis 2020. The group is headed by Prairie Crossing's George Ranney, who intends to replicate the strategies that guided the second phase of that development in other Chicagoland communities. The goal of Metropolis 2020, he says, is to improve quality of life so that people want to live in Chicago, which in turn makes businesses want to locate there so they can attract the best talent. That, he says, is what will make Chicago a viable, competitive metropolis through "2020 and beyond."

It all comes down to smart growth. "Planning is critical," Ranney says. "Build your new developments around transportation and put your workforce housing near jobs, rather than creating scenarios where workers are priced out of one area and find themselves forced to drive two or three hours [to work]."

The imperative of fitting together those two pieces -- transportation and housing -- is what led Ranney and Metropolis 2020 to push the state of Illinois to create CMAP, combining two agencies that had addressed transportation and land-use planning separately. "Without that kind of agency for making decisions about where investments should go, you're simply not going to deal with sprawl," he says. "Growth spinning out of control in the newer suburbs -- roads, sewers, schools -- means you don't have that money to spend in the cities and older suburbs. So they decline and people go farther out."

The challenge, explains Randy Blankenhorn, CMAP's executive director, is "how we make the city of Chicago work differently in the inner suburbs than the outer suburbs." Nobody expects Prairie Crossing to sprout 40-story apartment buildings, though some carefully planned increase in density is a goal. The problem is that to the uninitiated, the word density suggests crowding rather than efficiency, he says. "We're trying to say that in some communities, more dense development means four flats near your train station. That's all. What we really want to do is build suburban downtowns where people want to be -- a thriving, vibrant, and attractive downtown that's got open space, business, entertainment, and transportation."

CMAP and groups like Chicago's Metropolitan Mayors' Caucus (in which Blue Island's mayor, Donald Peloquin, is an active participant) play crucial roles in leading by example and coordinating the good efforts of many municipalities. But they cannot overcome the immutable fact that land-use decisions are controlled by local governments, whose archaic zoning laws have slowed smart growth plans in Prairie Crossing and Blue Island.

Where there is an absence of inspired local leadership, there is LEED-ND, which functions as a sort of do-it-yourself kit for smart growth, including how-tos for working with zoning boards. So far, it's the closest thing to a one-size-fits-all solution, providing a list of essential ingredients for developers and government officials who don't have a custom-made smart growth plan of their own. Kaid Benfield, who directs NRDC's smart growth program, has spent much of the past decade working toward the creation of LEED-ND as a solution to what George Ranney and others underscore as the ultimate problem: the absence of a coherent plan.

It's not just local and regional governments whose lack of planning has favored sprawl. Lack of coordination and foresight also afflicts the federal agencies that determine how taxpayer dollars will be spent. The Department of Transportation (DOT) does not consider how the roads we build today will influence development in the future. The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) will not fund affordable housing projects on brownfield sites -- and inner-city America has a lot of them -- because its definition of "clean" is different from that used by the EPA, which oversees brownfield remediation. What's more, the Federal Housing Authority's subsidized home-loan program doesn't consider location and transportation when determining whether a prospective buyer can afford a mortgage. Banks say that 30 percent of a family's annual income is a reasonable amount to spend on housing, but the math doesn't work if you have to foot the bill for two family cars and enough gas for a two-hour commute to work.

Last June, as I was preparing to visit Chicago, the Obama administration announced plans to establish a HUD-DOT-EPA task force, knocking down the barriers to smart growth caused by inadequate interagency cooperation. Although Washington cannot force municipal governments to follow coordinated plans for land use and local development, money is a powerful incentive, and the task force aims to channel the flow of dollars to projects that focus on smart growth goals.

"There are a lot of reasons to coordinate transportation investments with housing, water infrastructure, and economic development," says Beth Osborne, deputy assistant secretary for transportation policy at DOT and a member of the new task force. "It costs all governments less money because it requires less infrastructure investment." Funneling federal housing dollars toward residential projects near transit leads to lower household transportation costs, and creating walkable neighborhoods means fewer dollars spent on roads and other infrastructure. "We're getting more bang for your buck," Osborne says, if "we make sure that money is targeted toward those communities that find a way to coordinate."

THE VIEW FROM ABOVE

On my last day in Chicago, I paid a visit to City Hall to see Sadhu Johnston, deputy chief of staff for Mayor Richard Daley and the person responsible for all environmental initiatives within the city limits. (Shortly after our meeting, Johnston left to become deputy city manager for Vancouver, British Columbia, another metropolis commited to sustainable development.)

"We're not in a position to mandate how people act," Johnston said. But there are specific, concrete things a city can do to make green options attractive. This is where Chicago gets it right, with places like Millennium Park, miles of bike lanes, and congestion-busting initiatives such as raising street parking prices to encourage the use of public transportation. Johnston was a driving force behind the city's green roof initiative, part of Chicago's plan for mitigating and adapting to climate change. He seemed eager to show off his work, so we rode the elevator to the top floor and climbed a set of stairs to the roof. It took a moment to adjust to the strangeness of standing on top of an 11-story building, surrounded by grasses and flowering plants. There was even a beehive up there.

It was beautiful, and that was part of the point. In the end, no matter how many rules are changed and how much money is shuffled around, people have to want to live, work, and play in the efficient downtowns that planners are struggling to create. "Our first strategy is to make Chicago the most wonderful place it can be so that people want to live here, want to move here, want to keep their families here," Johnston said. "Smart growth is about making cities incredible places."

NRDC: Climate on the Farm

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

In this issue's Living Green column, Elizabeth Svoboda talks to winemakers who are looking to find ways to adapt to climate change. As a senior policy specialist in the San Francisco office, Jonathan Kaplan knows California's winemakers well: his job involves helping growers of all kinds find ways to improve the sustainability of their operations. OnEarth chats with NRDC's go-to guy for all things agricultural.

OE: Winemakers' efforts to adapt to climate change is one thing, but what about preventing it?

Kaplan: On most farms, nitrogen-based fertilizers are the largest source of greenhouse gases because they emit nitrous oxide, which is 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Grapes require less fertilizer than other crops, but irrigation is energy-intensive, so wine growers can cut emissions by minimizing water use.

OE: How do wine growers stack up in other respects?

Kaplan: They're very proactive. In terms of a particular commodity that's out ahead, it's difficult to think of a better example than the winegrape growers in California. The California Association of Winegrape Growers has developed a system for promoting sustainable practices, including things like planting grasses between vines to prevent soil erosion and to improve soil water retention. Winegrape growers have also partnered with non-profit organizations to create third party sustainability certifications for their industry in California. More broadly, certified organic growers also have a leg up. Organic growers typically have to rely on improved soil health, cover cropping, crop rotation and other practices in lieu of chemical inputs. As a result, organic farms are more reliant on and integrated with natural systems.

OE: How do you go about trying to help growers develop more sustainability practices?

Kaplan: Like anyone else, growers need a good reason to change practices, especially if the new practice increases their costs or risk. That reason might come from a more targeted government payment program, a more savvy customer asking for stewardship, better economics, or increased accountability for farming impacts to communities and the environment. Of course keeping growers in business -- making sure they remain profitable -- has to be part of this mix, too. When farms fold and the fields are paved over to build subdivisions, the environment loses. It's not a one-tool job. NRDC promotes more sustainable practices through outreach and education, market-based initiatives, and government advocacy.

OE: Can you give me an example of one of the tools you're using to accomplish these goals?

Kaplan: We're working with growers and food buyers to develop what we call a stewardship index. The goal is to provide a tool that lets anyone in the produce industry -- food processors, retailers, and distributors, as well as food service providers -- score the sustainable performance of their own operations. NRDC expects that the current group of growers, food buyers and NGOs governing the project will create an on-line platform to enable industry-wide benchmarking, comparing and, reporting. So rather than a pass/fail standard, the Stewardship Index will provide a way to assess relative performance in the industry.

If successful, the system will eventually be used by companies for self-assessment purposes and to make data-backed claims in the marketplace. It may also be used by third-party certifiers, socially-responsible investors, and policymakers.

OE: Why would a grower want to be a part of this process?

Kaplan: There is widespread interest in being "green" in business today, and it is already resulting in the proliferation of sustainability initiatives. Growers who sit on the sidelines will find that they missed the window to participate in developing the certification or program requested by their customers. Growers also have an interest the development of a single reporting or regulatory system rather than having to deal with many different systems established by various retailers or governments.

Toxic Screen

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

There are an estimated 80,000 chemicals on the market today, and most of them have never been tested to determine if they could cause cancer or interfere with our hormones. Chemicals that damage breast tissue are of particular concern, because breast cancer is one of the leading causes of death in American women. While federal legislation to strengthen chemical regulations is under consideration in Congress, a number of states, most notably California, have taken matters into their own hands by adopting stricter policies.

San Francisco-based NRDC staff scientists Sarah Janssen and Gina Solomon are among the 20 experts and advocates working to identify the type of toxicity information needed to evaluate a chemical's effect on the development of breast tissue and cancer susceptibility. "In the past, pathways linked to breast cancer haven't been considered in chemical toxicity tests, so there are no screens in place to detect potentially harmful chemicals," Janssen says. "This study will be a big step to address that gap." The California Breast Cancer Research Program, a state-endowed initiative administered by the University of California, provided funding.

Meanwhile, NRDC and other groups are pushing for reform of the Toxic Substances Control Act of 1976, a federal law widely regarded as ineffective because of its failure to require manufacturers to test new chemical products for toxic effects. Janssen and Solomon believe their California project will help guide this much-needed national reform and ultimately improve breast cancer prevention efforts.