OnEarth.org

Death at High Altitude

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

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

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

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

Polar Obsession

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Protecting Polar Bears

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

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

So, is there hope for the polar bear?

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

Would international protections eliminate all hunting of polar bears?

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

Could polar bears adapt to an environment without ice?

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

How many polar bears are there in the world?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fighting for Precious Ground

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

VAST IMPACT ON WILDLIFE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

HEAVY METALS, SEEPING TOXINS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

$100 MILLION ON STUDIES ALONE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"CARETAKERS OF OUR LAND"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where Will California Get Its Water?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are just a few of the most promising ones:

Strategy 1: Capturing Stormwater

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

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

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

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

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

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

Strategy 2: Water-Efficient Farming

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

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

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

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

Strategy 3: Grey Water at Home

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

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

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

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

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

Strategy 4: Public Education

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Endangered Tree

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

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

Does the Endangered Species Act already protect plants?

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

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

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

What are the main threats to whitebark pine?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Invasion of the Pine Beetles

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

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

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

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

Why are pine beetles so devastating to whitebark pine?

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

Why are whitebark pine trees important to the Yellowstone ecosystem?

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

When did the whitebark pine die-offs start?

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

Can anything be done to save them?

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

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

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

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

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

Resurrecting a River

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

RESHAPING THE LANDSCAPE

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BRINGING BACK THE FISH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FERTILIZING AN ECOSYSTEM

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What Ever Happened to the Climate Bill?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OBSTACLES

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

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

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

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

BRIGHT SPOTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spotlight: American Power

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

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

My Bad Collar

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

I remember unwrapping my cat's flea collars as a child. They were made of thick, rubbery plastic that had a distinctly powdery texture. But do these curious and seemingly innocuous necklaces put millions of children in harm's way?

Flea collars cover an animal's fur with a layer of pesticide, which kills fleas by disrupting the function of the insects' nervous system. Some collars contain tetrachlorvinphos (TCVP) and propoxur, chemicals that are toxic to the nervous system and carcinogenic. The EPA maintains that the amount of pesticide residue on your pet's fur is not harmful, but NRDC asserts that it is.

In a small study conducted by NRDC, 50 percent of dogs wearing TCVP flea collars had enough residue on their fur to pose a danger. That means a toddler who had two hours of exposure each day to the pet could be exposed to chemical levels exceeding EPA standards.

"Kids explore their environment in a hand-to-mouth way," says NRDC senior scientist Miriam Rotkin-Ellman. "So we think products such as these are unsafe." NRDC is petitioning that products containing these chemicals be taken off the market. To find out if your flea-prevention product is safe, visit greenpaws.org.

Whatever It Takes

Adam Spangler — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Lisa Suatoni has always taken her passions seriously. As a child growing up in western Pennsylvania, she was devoted to competitive gymnastics, juggling her schoolwork with a demanding practice schedule. That is, until the day her father sent her to scuba diving camp when she was in high school. Gymnastics quickly took a backseat to her newfound passion for the ocean, and when she headed off to college, it was to study biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Several decades have passed since Suatoni had her epiphany, and her fascination with the oceans remains undiminished. Armed now with a master's degree in environmental science and a Ph.D. in ecology and evolutionary biology from Yale, Suatoni serves a dual purpose as an NRDC scientist: she analyzes and translates technical studies for the organization's policy and advocacy teams, and she finds new ways to inspire public concern about the oceans’ increasingly grim prospects.

Suatoni is quick to point out that we have done a tragically thorough job of wiping out most of the large fish in the sea: between 75 percent and 90 percent of all tuna, sailfish, swordfish, and cod are now gone. But whereas we tend to notice this kind of thing on land -- say, on an African savanna that is noticeably devoid of lions and giraffes -- most of us don't notice when there are fewer billfish swimming around. More troubling still is the invisible threat that rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide pose to the sea. We worry about how global warming will affect humans and animals on land with little regard for what's happening in the oceans, where carbon pollution does more than make things hotter -- it also makes seawater more acidic. When carbon dioxide dissolves in seawater it creates carbonic acid, which in turn dissolves the carbonate shells of things like shrimp (which people eat) and of creatures that form the basis for the entire web of ocean life, such as krill (which whales eat) and phytoplankton (which krill eat).

"We are so terrestrially biased," Suatoni says. "Nearly every bit of land goes through zoning, but there is no comprehensive planning for oceans. We need to figure out what we have, first of all, and we need to manage those resources in a way that the ecosystem can handle."

Suatoni spent more than a year reviewing studies of commercial fish populations in U.S. waters and the effect that the fishing industry has on their health and survival. In 2006, with the help of Suatoni's scientific analyses, NRDC and its partners were finally able to close loopholes in the Magnuson-Stevens Fishery Conservation and Management Act that allowed fishermen operating in U.S. waters to catch more fish than many populations could sustain. She is now working with NRDC's oceans team to create what advocates call a spatial plan for the sea, which would govern use of the oceans much as land use is regulated.

Last year, in her role as public educator, Suatoni was invited to speak to executives at Warner Brothers about the effect of global warming and acidification on the world's oceans. She showed a series of animations and graphics to illustrate the invisible threats to the ocean's chemical balance and marine life. She soon found herself on television with Ellen DeGeneres, elbow-deep in a bowl of water, handling a sea cucumber, while explaining to Ellen and her audience how overfishing is devastating the oceans. The segment was as funny as it was serious, and communicated a crucial message to millions of viewers.

Suatoni's experience on Ellen reinforced her belief that people need to be able to see clearly the effects of our actions on the oceans. Words simply cannot convey the damage we're doing, particularly as it relates to ocean acidification. (For more on acidification, see "A Sea Less Hospitable to Life," this issue.)

"The nature of the problem is chemical," Suatoni says. "The relevant scientific terms -- 'pH' and 'carbonate saturation states' -- seem to trigger chemistry daze. I thought we could circumvent this problem by using simple animations to illustrate the chemical processes."

She went to NRDC's film team with the idea of making a movie, and they were sold. So were Howard and Michelle Hall, the cinematography team behind the IMAX films Deep Sea and Under the Sea, who agreed to contribute spectacular underwater footage to the project. The Discovery Channel liked the idea too and agreed to air the half-hour documentary that Suatoni inspired -- Acid Test -- on its Planet Green network in August. The film, which was supported by Warner Brothers and Universal Studios and funded through an Entertainment Industry Foundation grant, is now available on the Web at nrdc.org/oceans/acidification.

"Lisa is passionate, articulate, and funny," says Sarah Chasis, director of NRDC's ocean initiative. "Those traits make her very effective as a communicator, whether on national television or on Capitol Hill. And she's a true scientist. Combine those things, and her value to both NRDC and the oceans effort is priceless."

Art to Warm By

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

Among the more anticipated works of climate-change reading is the forthcoming novel by Ian McEwan -- although, as McEwan has said, the book is less "about" climate change than about human nature, in particular, the "rackety, quarrelsome, competitive, greedy, ambitious, politicking" climate scientist who is the novel's protagonist. McEwan was inspired in part by an Arctic expedition he took in 2005 sponsored by the British organization Cape Farewell (capefarewell.com), which seeks "to instigate a cultural response to climate change" by bringing together scientists and artists, including the playwright Suzan Lori-Parks, the conceptual artist Sophie Calle, and the performance artist Laurie Anderson. An exhibition that includes some Cape Farewell artists, "Earth: Art of a Changing World," will open in December at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

March of the Zombie Ants

Sophie Lubin — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Invasive fire ants from South America now infest 13 southeastern states, destroying valuable farmland and delivering painful stings to anyone who gets in their way. They are notoriously difficult to get rid of. You can bait their mounds, spray them with insecticide, or pray that a passing armadillo will eat them. Now researchers at Texas A&M propose sending in the tiny phorid fly. After the insect lays its eggs in the ant's body, the developing maggot begins to eat its way through the brain. The ant staggers around for several hours, understandably disoriented. Then its head falls off. We can't wait for someone to buy the movie rights.

A Sunny Day in Rizhao

Mara Hvistendahl — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Viewed from street level, Rizhao seems indistinguishable from dozens of other midsize Chinese cities. With a population of about 2.8 million, it is nestled on the east coast of Shandong Province, roughly halfway between Beijing and Shanghai. In complexes that sprouted almost overnight, their facades coated with the white tile that in China symbolizes a bright future, people rush in and out of bustling restaurants, spotless Avon cosmetics outlets, and glitzy furniture stores. Just beyond the downtown area, novice car owners speed down freshly paved highways, and backhoes break ground on developments aimed at a growing middle class.

Standing on the roof of the Shanshui Hotel, however, Fan Changwei, director of Rizhao's Environmental Protection Bureau, shows me a very different view of the city.

Marching out in one direction toward the ocean and in the other to the mountains, the gray concrete roofs of the apartment blocks are dotted with elongated red and silver objects, as if a giant had scattered a tray of oddly shaped marbles over the city. They are solar water heaters, and Rizhao has almost a million of them. Somehow, amid the rush of economic development, the city has managed to harness the power of the sun -- which shines here for 260 days a year -- to serve the needs of some 99 percent of its urban households.

Solar water heaters first caught on in China in the 1980s, when cities began to mushroom and people started moving out of housing provided by their work units, buying new homes, and investing in household appliances. At a couple hundred dollars each, the solar heaters pay for themselves in a few years with savings on energy bills.

It's easy to identify the older buildings in Rizhao -- the water heaters are laid out in haphazard fashion, installed by the residents themselves. On the newer buildings, the arrangement is more orderly, with the heaters forming rows that divide the rooftops into neat sections. After 2003, Fan explains, Rizhao began requiring real estate developers to install them on all new structures. For the thousands of rural villagers who relocate to the city each year, and for the locals who make enough to upgrade to larger homes, the heaters are a built-in bonus.

Many of them are produced in southern Shandong by businesses with names like Bright Dawn, Bright and Glorious, and Clear and Bright. Working with the provincial government, the Rizhao authorities funded research that brought the cost of a standard 32-gallon solar water heater down to 1,600 yuan ($230). By using a solar heater for 15 years, a family can save 15,000 yuan ($2,200) on electricity bills, a significant amount in a country where annual per capita income is around $6,000.

The strength of the program lies in "leapfrogging" -- not developing first and cleaning up afterward, as happened with the industrial revolution in the West, but getting people hooked on solar energy as an integral part of the development process. "There are lots of opportunities [in China] because of rapid growth," explains Xuemei Bai, an expert on climate and urban design at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization, Australia's national science agency. "You don't have to retrofit existing buildings."

In Chinese, Rizhao means "first to see the sun." The name refers to the city's location on the eastern edge of Shandong Province, across the Yellow Sea from South Korea. The region's gently curving bays have been considered choice real estate for 4,000 years, giving rise in the Neolithic period to a sophisticated civilization with refined pottery and rice and silk production. For most of the modern era, however, the area remained stubbornly undeveloped. As late as the 1980s, Rizhao was still a conglomeration of fishing villages. Then it repositioned itself as a port, shipping Shandong's abundant supply of coal to Japan, and was finally designated a city by the provincial government in 1989. But the price of coal remained so low that the industry brought Rizhao little prosperity, and in the mid-1990s, as free-market reforms swept China, the city's leaders convened to consider its future.

Rizhao had, on the one hand, a modest industrial base, with its proximity to coal mines, fisheries, and factories producing cement and paper. On the other hand, there were the attractions of its natural environment: a prime beachfront location and mountains that offered a pleasant weekend diversion. The debate about the city's development strategy continued until 2001, when a young industrial engineer, Li Zhaoqian, took over as mayor. Li, who has degrees from both British and American universities, decided he would set the city on a green path that would be the envy of many Western cities.

In 2003, Rizhao published its 180-page Ecological Development Plan. Soon afterward, it made solar water heaters mandatory on new buildings. Though ambitious, the plan made some compromises. The city remains China's second-largest coal-exporting port, and to mollify officials who feared that going green would stymie economic development, some polluting enterprises were moved to outlying areas rather than closed down. Others would be equipped with clean technologies -- scrubbers to limit pollution from the coal-fired power plant, biodigesters to convert organic waste from citric acid and grain alcohol factories into methane, which would have a guaranteed buyer (the local power authority, which was required to purchase a quota).

North of the docks, a four-square-mile area has been transformed. There is an aquamarine bay popular with rowing teams, a luxury hotel, and a maze of neat paths lined with photovoltaic-powered street lamps. The new-look Rizhao won the rights to host a string of sailing competitions, including international championships in 2005 and 2006. According to the city's foreign affairs office, seven million tourists now visit every year.

But Rizhao doesn't plan to stop there. In 2008 it vowed to go carbon neutral, becoming one of the first four cities to join the United Nations Environment Program's Climate Neutral Network (the other three cities are in Norway, Sweden, and Canada). Fan Changwei says that Rizhao's outlying villages are using biogas stoves that run on crop waste; next comes wind power. The city already claims to have cut its carbon dioxide emissions by half and its overall energy use by one-third since 2003.

The big question is whether Rizhao's success can spread to the rest of the country. The pace of China's transformation is mind-boggling. From 1982 to 2000, more than 200 million Chinese moved from rural to urban areas, and in the coming decades the rate of migration will almost certainly accelerate. By 2025, according to a report by the consulting firm McKinsey & Company, the country will add another 350 million urban inhabitants -- more than the entire population of the United States. More than two-thirds of them will be rural migrants, part of the largest migration in human history. These will be high-stress years for China's urban planners. McKinsey predicts that the transformation will require 54 billion square feet of paved roads, 430 billion square feet of floor space, and an estimated 50,000 skyscrapers. Demand for energy -- already growing at 9.3 percent a year -- will skyrocket. Central government officials have long understood the strain this boom places on the country's resources, and in 2005 they unveiled a comprehensive renewable-energy law, which aims to increase China's percentage of power from renewable sources, including solar, to 15 percent by 2020.

China has far outpaced the United States and other Western countries in its adoption of low-cost solar power. Today it leads the world in both production and use of solar water heaters, with more than 40 million units in service in 2007 -- two-thirds of total global capacity. A larger concern is whether China can move on to adopt more complex solar technologies. Its photovoltaic industry is thriving, placing China third behind only Germany and Japan in production. Shi Zhengrong, founder of the firm Suntech in the city of Wuxi, south of Rizhao, ranked on the Forbes 2008 list of the world's 500 richest individuals. But 98 percent of the photovoltaic panels produced by Suntech and other Chinese firms are sent abroad.

A major hurdle to the widespread adoption of photovoltaics in China has been the high price of the technology. There is some cause for optimism, however. In March, China's Ministry of Finance announced it would soon begin subsidizing the installation of photovoltaic panels on rooftops and on buildings under construction. These subsidies would allow cities like Rizhao to move beyond photovoltaic streetlights and isolated demonstration projects, connecting solar power to the grid to meet the city's overall energy demand.

Certainly Rizhao's accomplishments have not gone unnoticed by the central government, which in 2005 named it an Environmental Model City. According to an official at the Ministry of Science and Technology who oversees research on renewable energy, the government is considering a policy that would mandate solar water heaters in new buildings nationwide. And Rizhao's former mayor Li was recently promoted to vice governor of Shandong, a perch from which he is now attempting to replicate Rizhao's development model across the province.

It is local leaders such as Li who wield the real influence in China's cities, determining investment in basic infrastructure, including power, water, and roads. Unlike Li, however, most of them have done little or nothing for the environment. Perversely, they may even be discouraged by the terms of the Environmental Model City award given to Rizhao. To get this recognition, a city needs to conduct regular environmental assessments, invest more than 1.7 percent of its gross domestic product in environmental protection, and have minimal air pollution for 310 days a year. Selection depends on everything from the percentage of vehicles passing emissions tests (more than 80) to the percentage of schools offering courses in environmental education (more than 85). According to the United Nations Environment Program, many local leaders are reluctant to apply for the distinction for fear they will fail to make the grade and face punishment.

But China's leaders intended something else with the 1989 Environmental Protection Law, which established an "environmental responsibility system" that places the burden on local officials. "If a mayor or [other] top leaders are interested in doing something, they can make it happen," says Xuemei Bai. The proof is a mayor like Li, who "was visionary and had very strong leadership skills."

Much the same thing happened in Dalian, a major port city to the north of Rizhao, which was cleaned up in the 1990s by an energetic mayor, Bo Xilai. Like Li, he was tapped for higher office, most recently becoming party secretary of Chongqing, a sprawling megalopolis in central China whose environmental problems include stifling levels of air pollution in addition to the health concerns, landslides, and other woes brought on by the Three Gorges Dam.

Local officials who are determined to bring about positive change increasingly have leaders like Li and Bo to look to for inspiration. They also have the residents of their cities, average Chinese people who have been adopting technologies like solar water heaters purely for practical reasons for years. Rizhao shows how far simple incentives can go toward changing a city's outlook, and how acting locally, as the old environmental mantra goes, can reverberate far beyond local limits. That's far from a panacea, but with time running out for China, it's a good start.

Going to the Mat

Harriet Rohmer — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

By 2007, el Hijo del Santo (Son of the Saint) was the reigning superstar of the sport of lucha libre, or "free fighting," a form of wrestling that is second only to soccer as the most popular spectator sport in Mexico. The wrestlers wear colorful masks and flashy costumes representing heroes and villains, often incorporating visual elements from Mexico's indigenous past. "Our fights are like the struggle between good and evil," Santo says. "I'm one of the good guys."

With millions of fans in Mexico and the United States, Santo wanted to use his popularity to benefit the environment. His chance came when he heard a radio interview with Wildcoast/Costasalvaje, a group that was working to protect the coastline on both sides of the U.S.–Mexico border. The group was looking for a celebrity to help get its message across, and Santo volunteered.

The strategy was simple. He would meet with children in critical areas, educating them about their local environment and urging them to become directly involved in protecting it. With TV crews following his every move, he hoped to persuade leaders in government, business, and the nonprofit world to protect endangered species, restore wetlands, and contribute to sustainable economic development.

A first stop for the surprisingly soft-spoken fighter was Colonia San Bernardo, a poor, makeshift community on a ravaged hillside above Tijuana. San Bernardo had no waste management and no piped-in water. During the rainy season, trash thrown into the canyons overflowed into the Tijuana River, clogged up the wetlands, and ended up polluting the ocean on the U.S. side of the border.

Santo walked through the muddy streets in his silver mask and black jeans, signing autographs for local children. He told them that the stream that fed into the river was badly polluted and that playing in it could make them sick. He asked them to throw their trash in the trash bins, not in the canyons. "Santo is fighting to keep the river clean," he said, "but he can't do it alone. He needs the help of all the children. Will you be on my team? Are you with me?" Mesmerized by the presence of a hero they'd seen on TV, the kids raised their fists and shouted, "We're with you, Santo!"

Oscar Romo, an environmentalist and city planner at the University of California, San Diego, has mentored many of the children. "Santo really got their attention," he says. "They're going to remember what he says for a long time -- and get their families involved too." In the months following Santo's visit, not only did the children become more vigilant about keeping the river clean, but the city of Tijuana, thanks to Romo's efforts, finally agreed to hook up Colonia San Bernardo to the municipal waste-treatment system.

Santo's next stop was the near-pristine Laguna San Ignacio in Baja California, a birthing place for Pacific gray whales and a feeding ground for endangered sea turtles, where the Natural Resources Defense Council has worked for years to stop the threat of commercial development.

Visiting a local school, Santo explained why it was wrong to kill sea turtles for their meat or their eggs and told the kids that the gray whales everybody loved would die if the lagoon became polluted. The answer to his appeal for help was the same as it had been in Tijuana: "We're with you, Santo!"

Again, TV coverage of Santo's visit helped attract new kinds of support. Along with funding for conservation easements and sustainable agriculture came grants for solar and wind energy projects -- as well as dedicated instructors to train local people to maintain the new technology.

Last year 7,000 fans came to see Santo accept a Hero of the Environment award at the Monterey Bay Aquarium in California. "This is the most important fight of my life," he said, pledging to continue his efforts, "and I need all the children to be on my team!"

Between the Lines: The Law of the Sea

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

Presidential Memorandum: On June 12, President Obama announced the formation of an Ocean Policy Task Force. That means the nation could soon have a federal policy to protect, maintain, and restore coastal and freshwater ecosystems. Here's NRDC's take.

"...We have a stewardship responsibility to maintain healthy, resilient, and sustainable oceans, coasts, and Great Lakes resources for the benefit of this and future generations. Yet, the oceans, coasts, and Great Lakes are subject to substantial pressures and face significant environmental challenges. Challenges include water pollution and degraded coastal water quality caused by industrial and commercial activities both onshore and offshore, habitat loss, fishing impacts, invasive species, disease, rising sea levels, and ocean acidification. Oceans both influence and are affected by climate change. They not only affect climate processes but they are also under stress from the impacts of climate change. Renewable energy, shipping, and aquaculture are also expected to place growing demands on ocean and Great Lakes resources..."

"The Great Lakes Basin holds 20 percent of the earth's freshwater. As we face global water scarcity, the challenge is that the approach to water in the Great Lakes Basin presumes abundance and ready access. But we need to control the amount of water we divert out of the lakes and promote conservation."

"Scientists have found that the pulses from air guns, which are used in seismic surveys by offshore oil and gas developers as they look for reserves under the seafloor, can injure and even kill marine wildlife, including whales and dolphins. Avoiding oil and gas development in important ecological areas -- such as those of high marine animal abundance -- is the best way to lessen the impact on marine life."

"A dirty little secret is that urban runoff, which often flows without any treatment into coastal waters, is now one of the nation's biggest sources of water pollution. Green cities, with water-absorbing elements such as roof gardens, can help prevent urban pollutants from being swept into coastal waters."

"There are wind projects in development off the coast of Long Island as well as on Lakes Erie and Ontario. We're excited about the projects but want to make sure that they occur in areas that do not harm critical habitat and ecosystems for important marine and avian wildlife."

Green to the Core: Fall 2009

June Apple — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

I love milk -- the real stuff, from cows. Most Americans seem to agree, based on the fact that the average U.S. citizen consumes 1.64 pounds of dairy products every day. (That's 600 pounds a year.) Most of that milk comes from large dairy farms, where hundreds of thousands of cows burp and pass methane, a potent greenhouse gas, all day long. According to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, livestock operations rival the transportation sector in their overall global warming footprint.

Figuring out how the alternatives -- goat, soy, and hemp milk, among others -- stack up is not so easy. Nobody has done a rigorous comparative analysis of the environmental impact of various "milk" products. What we do know is that methane emissions per kilogram of goat milk are higher than those of cow milk. Soybean farms often displace forests, including swaths of the Amazon rainforest, and use a lot of pesticides. By comparison, hemp requires far less water and fewer pesticides, but it's illegal to grow it in the United States. However, the vast majority of all hemp food products sold in this country come from Canada -- not quite local, but close. Hemp milk may be the best alternative (and no, drinking it will not get you high).

The (New) Web of Life

Alan Burdick — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

E. O. Wilson has a dream. In 2003, in an essay in the scholarly journal Trends in Ecology & Evolution, the eminent Harvard biologist sketched out his vision for what he called "a single-portal electronic encyclopedia of life." This encyclopedia -- a Web site, essentially -- would grant each of the documented 1.8 million species on earth its own page featuring a detailed summary of everything known about it: its scientific name, habitat, and geographic range and distribution; what it eats and is eaten by; and where it fits on the evolutionary tree of life. There would also be hyperlinks to genetic databases and other pertinent information. It would be freely accessible to everyone everywhere, scientist and layman alike. In a speech at the 2007 TED conference, an annual mixer of creative and scientific minds, Wilson likened the encyclopedia to "a biological moon shot" in its ambition and imperative.

He'd hit the right note for the right crowd at the right time. Work had already started on the encyclopedia, and financial support was beginning to flow. The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation together provided $12.5 million in seed money, with the prospect of additional funds dependent on the program's progress. Several major scientific organizations signed on with personnel, logistical support, and financing. (Wilson, though not directly involved in the encyclopedia, operates as its avuncular totem and most prominent booster.) All told, the project could consume as much as $100 million in its first decade. Meanwhile, the software developer Adobe Systems, known for its popular creative applications like Photoshop and Flash, volunteered to develop a cutting-edge user interface for the encyclopedia, something to shake the cobwebs off the old "tree of life" metaphor and reimagine it for the twenty-first century. Silicon Valley discovered nature, and it was good.

In February 2008 the Encyclopedia of Life saw first light at eol.org. With Web pages for 30,000 species, mostly fish and amphibians, it was but a shadow of its promised future self. Yet with its appealing layout and media visibility, the site proved instantly popular, crashing five hours -- and nearly two million page hits -- after launch. The encyclopedia has grown rapidly since, adding staff and expertise, forming new partnerships with libraries and biodiversity databases, expanding the pool of organisms it can represent online, and adding interactive components like the opportunity for users to post comments and tags or upload photographs via Flickr. It's not yet the Google of biology, but it's one step closer. "We showed proof of concept," says David Patterson, a microbiologist at the Woods Hole Marine Biological Laboratory who helped develop the encyclopedia's software engine. "The rest is just a chore."

Biology has been creeping online for some time now. The Wikipedia model is especially contagious, and numerous subject-specific Wikis, such as GeneWiki and WikiPathways, have sprung up to help scientists share information, interact, and collaborate. For veteran biodiversity scientists accustomed to the dour theme of species loss and the loneliness of an underfunded profession, the excitement and attention surrounding the encyclopedia are a particularly refreshing change. "I've never been involved in anything in my entire life that has generated so much enthusiasm," says Jesse Ausubel, an environmental scientist at Rockefeller University and the founding chairman of the Encyclopedia of Life's original steering committee. "The reaction has been overwhelmingly positive. The biggest problem has been managing expectations. People don't want to wait. This should have existed yesterday; they want it tomorrow."

Some, however, are skeptical. "In my 25 years of databasing and bioinformatics, I've seen so many projects like this come and go that it's hard to get excited about the next one," says Barbara Thiers, director of the New York Botanical Garden's Herbarium, a prized collection of several thousand plant specimens from around the world. And with so many species in peril, is $100 million really best spent by giving every one of them ... a Web page? Meanwhile, the 1.8 million known species are a small fraction of all those yet to be discovered, catalogued, and named. How would the encyclopedia help them?

Patterson sympathizes. As a leading expert on marine microbes -- a vast, poorly known, and terribly uncharismatic category of organisms -- he appreciates the plight of the world's species and of the unheralded scientists who track them. Yes, he says, the encyclopedia will be cool, comprehensive, and visually dazzling. But the real promise is hidden under the hood. The encyclopedia's true gift, he contends, is in its potential to pool and sift biological data from everywhere, in a manner that will change the quantity and quality of what scientists -- and casual viewers -- can learn about life on earth and the manner in which they do so. Never mind evolution; this is revolution.

Patterson works out of a two-story clapboard building in the postcard village of Woods Hole, Massachusetts, not far from the ferry landing to Martha's Vineyard. His colleagues call him Paddy and often greet him with some variation on "Hey, dude," even though Patterson is in his late fifties. In dress he is thoughtfully disheveled: rumpled button-down shirt, khakis, sandals over socks. In conversation he reveals an Irish accent that's been loosely combed by his years in English and Australian academia. When I enter, he swivels away from a pair of flat-screen monitors on his desk. "Hey, man," he says, and motions to an empty chair.

He flips open his laptop. He wants to share a PowerPoint presentation that he's been giving lately at professional meetings to introduce and explain the Encyclopedia of Life to working biologists. While he struggles to open the right file -- "A pox on the world," he says with a laugh -- my attention wanders to what looks like a small Japanese stone garden on his desk, the sort of thing a person might soothingly rake during international phone calls about database incompatibilities. In fact it's the litter box for J. B., a green iguana that roams Patterson's office and occasionally peeks out from behind a monitor. He arrived some months earlier as the subject of a photo shoot for the encyclopedia's splash page and stuck around. "He's our conscience," Patterson says. "With the encyclopedia being so computer based, it's important to maintain the reminder that what we're really trying to do is about biology."

Patterson runs the encyclopedia's biodiversity informatics team. Informatics is the emerging, and increasingly central, art and science of computer-data management. Nowadays the major sciences are awash in raw data. Earth-observing satellites beam back innumerable details about the planet's workings, from the shifting area of Arctic sea ice to the respiration rates of Pacific plankton. NASA telescopes fill data banks with images -- infrared to ultraviolet -- of near and deep space. Lately the hippest theories in science involve not how to interpret all this data but how best to mine, manage, massage, and visualize it.

Biodiversity informatics is a newcomer to the party; in many ways the Encyclopedia of Life marks its official coming out. Of the tens of thousands of biologists around the world, only some 6,000 are taxonomists, trained to identify new species and confirm the identity of existing ones. They are experts in spiders, experts in sea worms, experts in fungi. Theirs is tedious work: peering through microscopes day after day, counting tiny hairs on tiny stems or tiny legs to distinguish one organism from another. The rise of ecology brought a wider appreciation of biological systems and the ties that bind them. Yet a knowledge of the particulars -- how to identify individual species -- is as critical as ever. "You can't do much about preserving biodiversity if you don't know what you're looking at," Thiers says.

Patterson calls taxonomists "custodians of knowledge." The sum of their tremendous wisdom, he notes, is mostly squirreled away in eccentric custodial closets: published in hard-to-find journals, crammed into personal libraries, pinned in specimen drawers in back rooms of museums, locked away in graying heads. These databases are unique, essential, and almost entirely off the electronic grid. "There's mine right there," he says, pointing to two wide filing cabinets against one wall of his office. The rest of the wall is occupied by shelves thick with books suitable for a microbiology library -- The Mycetozoans, The Trichomycetes, The Biology of Amoeba, The Cellular Slime Molds -- or, perhaps, for an old episode of Star Trek. The most accessible book has a familiar yellow binding: Iguanas for Dummies.

The project and promise of the Encyclopedia of Life is to pry all of this information from its various closets and make it universally accessible online. Open-source computing, meet open-source biology. "Taxonomists tend to be possessive," Patterson says. "They hold what they find. But it's not a model that will work going into the future. The challenge is to shift taxonomy out of its parochial format into one that's considerably larger than the sum of its parts."

As a kid growing up in Belfast, Patterson had a running debate with his older brother, Samuel, now a prominent mathematician in Germany. Math, his brother argued, is the underpinning of the universe, the logical framework from which all other knowledge emerges. Young David disagreed. He reasoned that mathematics is a product of the human brain, which evolved imperfectly through natural selection, so it cannot be internally consistent. "Then he'd sit on me -- that's how every argument ended -- and I'd go off and stare at the garden pond."

Patterson bought a microscope to study the pond more closely and developed what would become a lifelong fascination with microbes. A few years ago he created Microscope, a communal Web site where microbe wonks could share photos and descriptions of their favorite organisms, and which opened his eyes to the encyclopedia's possibilities. All the while, the old debate gnawed at him. The so-called hard sciences have coalesced around fundamental entities: physics has atoms, particles, and formulas; chemistry has 117 periodic elements (and counting), which are readily described by their physical properties. The closest thing biology has to atoms, Patterson says, are species-loosely defined, hotly debated groupings that number in the millions. With the encyclopedia, Patterson believes he's found a unifying code.

It's tempting to think of the encyclopedia as a larger version of Microscope: a single, Wikipedia-style database of everything known about life on earth. In fact, it's really an automated index, more Google than Wiki. The user sees a collection of Web pages describing the world's organisms in a standardized format: physical appearance, size, geographic range and distribution, and the like. Backstage, computer algorithms trawl the Internet and online databases, grab pertinent bits of data, and aggregate them for the viewer -- on demand, in real time, and seamlessly.

Developing that software was Patterson's task, and it's largely complete. He found that every organism can be described by a series of three-part statements, or "triples": its scientific name, a feature (shape, color, geographical region, and so on), and the character of that feature (for example, round, blue, Indonesia). Each of those elements can then be assigned a numerical value. A certain species of freshwater algae, for instance, might be given three tags: for its name (Gymnodium hiemale, denoted by the number 00631956), a feature (cell shape, or 88158), and the state of that feature (ovoid, or 0007). In the cyber environment, that species becomes known as 00631956:88158:0007 -- a forbidding number, to be sure, but one that the encyclopedia bots can readily nab, reshuffle, and build upon.

The approach is standard in engines like Google Maps. For Patterson it offers a basic language through which separate biological databases can be made to talk to one another and represents a way to extract data in a format that is finer and more flexible than the one in which it was first entered. "The encyclopedia is a demonstration that there's a particular logic that will work for all organisms," he says. The shoptalk around his office involves "mashups" and "data objects" and "atoms of information," as when Patterson says, "Taxonomy should become no longer a listing of species but a style of managing atoms of information."

Unlike Google, however, the Encyclopedia of Life is starved for material; although the number of species pages has now reached 170,000, there is yet relatively little to be mashed up. The initial version was filled mainly with fish and amphibians because it drew largely from two of the only databases that already existed, FishBase and AmphibiWeb, both painstakingly assembled by outside natural-history groups. Accordingly, one whole branch of the encyclopedia project is working to create new databases and make existing ones digitally accessible.

The encyclopedia is divided into five groups. One, managed out of Harvard, handles education and outreach to the general public. A second, the Biodiversity Synthesis Group, based at the Field Museum in Chicago, organizes workshops for taxonomists to hash out classification issues and consider which species the encyclopedia should next focus its efforts on. A third unit, at the Smithsonian, recruits new taxonomists from around the world to help authenticate the species information that ends up on the EOL Web site. The fourth unit, the Scanning and Digitization group, also at the Smithsonian, is responsible for forming relationships with data partners and adding new content to the encyclopedia-a key role as it seeks to expand its representation of life on earth. This group is led by the Biodiversity Heritage Library, a consortium of 10 natural history and botanical libraries, which is scanning and digitizing everything published about biodiversity before 1923 -- about 500 million pages of literature. (So far it has put nine million pages online, searchable by the EOL bots and available to anyone free of charge.) Many of the plant specimens in the New York Botanical Garden's vast collection have been digitally photographed; these too will be tapped by the encyclopedia. The encyclopedia has also formed partnerships with the Tree of Life project, a longstanding effort to map the evolutionary heritage of the world's species, and the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, a nexus of information on museum specimens and field observations.

The fifth and best-financed group is Patterson's biodiversity informatics unit. To help bring more species information into the encyclopedia, the unit recently developed a do-it-yourself database kit called LifeDesk to distribute to taxonomists. If you're an expert on, say, the mollusks of the Pacific Northwest, you (or your grad students) can readily input everything you've gathered and published about the species you know -- life history, identifying traits, images -- in a standardized format. At your invitation, other naturalists -- or even a high school teacher or a park ranger with a passion for identifying, say, ferns or mushrooms or scarab beetles -- can pool their knowledge with yours. A push of a button opens your database to the encyclopedia's data grabbers.

It's worth noting that the content on the encyclopedia Web site cannot be directly altered. Nobody will be randomly redefining an aardvark as "one ugly animal" or a "medium-size inflatable banana," the sort of shenanigans that occur regularly on Wikipedia. Instead, edits can be made only in the databases where the information actually resides. This data is then sucked into the encyclopedia, where Web pages for individual species or groups are further "curated" by selected taxonomists, who monitor incoming data and moderate any disputes. (Lay visitors can also add their own species information, but it will be marked in yellow as unvetted.) LifeDesk is just one more way of ensuring that whatever information appears in the encyclopedia has been approved by a professional biologist. Between LifeDesk and Scratchpad, a similar project run by the Natural History Museum in London that is popular in Europe, Patterson hopes to have 50 percent of the world's taxonomists online in the next two to three years, all pooling their data for the encyclopedia to browse.

Once the encyclopedia has grown to include perhaps half a million species -- which might take three to five years -- it will dramatically broaden what scientists can learn about life on earth. "The value of the encyclopedia as a whole is as a macroscope, to look across the big picture of hundreds of thousands of species," says Jesse Ausubel of Rockefeller University. A scientist might compare the life spans of hundreds of species across taxa and habitats to see what patterns emerge -- the sort of study that currently is too complicated and expensive to conduct. Another might employ tags (a recently added feature of the encyclopedia) to establish which organisms eat, and are eaten by, others, thereby beginning to assemble a robust picture of food webs. Like Google Maps, the Encyclopedia of Life potentially offers a thick data platform on which other layers can be rapidly built.

It's a new approach to biodiversity research, driven less by theory and more by one's ability to imaginatively sift and slice data. Ausubel is a big fan of baseball, which in recent years has been transformed by sabermetrics, the analysis of nontraditional player statistics across the leagues. (The term is derived from the acronym SABR, for the Society for American Baseball Research.) A casual glance at the midseason stats, for instance, reveals that the rookie position player with the best "VORP," a useful rating that gauges his value, in runs, over a potential replacement player, was Casey McGehee of the Milwaukee Brewers. Teams like the Boston Red Sox have succeeded in part by mastering the analysis of such data. The amassed data in the encyclopedia may well offer similar surprises. "I expect there will be lots of unexpected discoveries," Ausubel says. "All kinds of curious things could turn up."

The Encyclopedia of Life represents a race against time. Our planet is experiencing rapid environmental change. Numerous species, from rare Hawaiian caterpillars to Arctic polar bears, may well be extinct by the time the encyclopedia achieves its goal of indexing the world's 1.8 million known species -- never mind those still undocumented, which may number in the hundreds of millions. As E. O. Wilson put it during his address at the TED conference, "Our knowledge of biodiversity is so incomplete that we are at risk of losing a great deal of it before it is ever discovered."

By bringing reliable information into one place online, the encyclopedia promises to hasten and democratize the process of identifying new and existing species. First-world libraries, where the bulk of knowledge about biodiversity resides, will become more accessible to naturalists in less developed countries, where most of the world's biodiversity actually lives. Biologists can put data about newly discovered species online almost immediately, instead of waiting months or years for it to appear in obscure journals. "Taxonomists are completely swamped by their inability to share their research and get specimens," says David Shorthouse, a young ecologist and spider expert on Patterson's staff. "This is an opportunity to accelerate taxonomy beyond our wildest dreams."

Looming behind the biodiversity crisis, meanwhile, is an equally pressing if far less recognized concern, what one might call the biodiversity-scientist crisis. Taxonomists are the librarians of life; without them, nature's volumes are meaningless. But taxonomy is dwindling and its members aging, as universities and museums cut financing for this unglamorous yet essential science. "The sad thing is, just as the Encyclopedia of Life has come along, the number of people who supply biodiversity information is very small," says Barbara Thiers of the New York Botanical Garden. "People aren't being trained to identify individual organisms anymore. If the encyclopedia can change that, that would be wonderful."

Patterson is betting that it will, in part because there is no alternative. "Taxonomy is at a break point," he says. Sure, he can see how it might seem more fruitful to put the encyclopedia money into the pockets of taxonomists. But do the math: $25 million (four years' worth of financing from the Sloan and MacArthur foundations) divided by 6,000 scientists would give each one "about enough to get you on an airplane and home -- and then we're right back where we began." The encyclopedia offers a less direct but surer path to long-term recovery. "We have given relevance to what taxonomists are doing, and out of relevance should come increased funding and attention," he says.

Half the trick going forward involves generating buzz: convincing the Facebook generation that counting tiny hairs on tiny stems or tiny insect legs is a doubly exciting career path now that you can link all your data to a global network of tiny-hair counters. That may be the easy part. Another obstacle is financial. Universities and museums must be persuaded that hiring taxonomists is a doubly worthwhile investment, now that their contributions are published online and for free. The old-school approach, of publishing taxonomic discoveries in journals that virtually nobody in the world could access or read, at least gave department chairs and financing committees something tangible to track and count toward your tenure.

The larger challenge, as the journal Science recently put it, is in "converting scientists from data hoarders to data sharers." The issue is everywhere in academia now, as Googlization pushes researchers to go online and open-source. It's part of what convinced Patterson to join the encyclopedia project in 2007; he felt that only someone with his senior standing in taxonomy could afford to take the leap. "If I were younger, this could be an absolute killer of career," he says from his swivel chair. J. B. the iguana is peeking out from behind a monitor again and is giving Patterson the inscrutable eye. "Out of this comes no papers, no academic appointments. I'm treating this as my last job in professional life."

In fact, it's not. Under the leadership of Patterson and many other project scientists, the encyclopedia has done well; in August it received two more years of grant money from the Sloan and MacArthur foundations, worth another $12.5 million-a reassuring if not unexpected thumbs-up. The renewal brings some changes, however, including a new manager of the biodiversity informatics group. "EOL is moving from proof of concept into industrial-strength implementation," Breen Byrne, the project's publicity officer, wrote in an e-mail. Patterson's replacement, who has yet to be hired, will have "additional expertise in implementing large-scale portals and databases." Patterson, meanwhile, will move up, or perhaps aside, into the self-titled role of senior taxonomist, a still vague advisory position that likely will involve pulling other taxonomists and their content into the EOL fold.

Once a tiny-hair counter, always a tiny-hair counter, it seems. Thanks in part to the Encyclopedia of Life, that fate is far brighter than it has ever been.

The Road Ahead

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

$20 Per Gallon: How the Inevitable Rise in the Price of Gasoline Will Change Our Lives for the Better

Christopher Steiner

Grand Central Publishing, 288 pp., $24.99

Two Billion Cars: Driving Toward Sustainability

Daniel Sperling and Deborah Gordon

Oxford University Press, 320 pp., $24.95

In July 1964, when I was 5, my parents, two siblings, and I piled into my dad's beloved Ford Galaxie 500 and drove 1,200 miles from our home in Des Moines, Iowa, to New York City to attend the World's Fair. I remember IBM's spectacular rising movie theater, the tire-shaped Ferris wheel emblazoned with "U S Royal Tires," the almost frighteningly lifelike Abraham Lincoln delivering the Gettysburg Address. Best of all, to my 5-year-old's eyes, was General Motors' Futurama exhibit -- a slow ride through a series of giant dioramas showing what life would be like in the future. There were scenes of busy astronauts plying the moon in lunar rovers, an undersea world where trains of submarines ferried people to a glass-walled hotel on the ocean floor, and rugged mountains crisscrossed by wide ribbons of superhighway. The grand finale was a vast, sparkling City of Tomorrow, where Jetson-like pod buildings, impossibly tall skyscrapers, and what seemed to me like hundred-lane freeways commingled in an urban utopia teeming with vehicles -- the majority, no doubt, made by GM.

In the mid-1960s, as for most of the twentieth century, GM was the largest company in the world's premier industry. Today, almost half a century later, its future is uncertain as it struggles to survive after emerging from bankruptcy. Two new books, $20 Per Gallon by Christopher Steiner and Two Billion Cars by Daniel Sperling and Deborah Gordon, offer portraits of a post-GM Futurama. What will life be like when gasoline prices rise to roughly seven times their present level, or when the planet's vehicle population doubles? Both scenarios will inevitably come to pass, the authors assert. And yet they spin starkly different, even mutually exclusive, versions of the future. One book is jauntily optimistic, striking a tone of utopian triumphalism. The other describes, in dense detail, a daunting uphill battle that must be waged if the world is to avoid vehicular suicide. Which version of the future will prove more accurate over the coming decades?

It's tempting to choose $20 Per Gallon. In it, Steiner (a writer for Forbes magazine with degrees in civil engineering and journalism) performs "a thought experiment on the what-ifs of high gas prices." Taking peak oil -- the notion that world oil production is at or near its all-time high -- as a given, he offers what he calls "the next step in the conversation." The book's eight chapters buck the convention of sequential numbering. Instead, they are labeled with gas-price levels and their projected consequences, such as "Chapter $6: Society Change and the Dead SUV," "Chapter $8: The Skies Will Empty," and so on at $2 intervals, up to "Chapter $20: The Future of Energy."

The implications of rising gasoline prices pervade every aspect of our lives, Steiner notes. Just about everything will cost more, but that's actually a good thing, he says. In fact, there's almost no environmental or political ill that escalating gas prices won't solve. The era of the SUV, which roared to life in the 1990s when gas prices dipped below $1 a gallon, skidded to a crawl at $4 and will end for good at $6. Higher gas prices means that motorists will drive fewer miles, leading to lower highway fatality rates. A price increase from $4 per gallon to $6 would save 4,000 American lives a year, he calculates. Air pollution would decrease, saving more lives, and the obesity rate would decline, since people tend to walk and bicycle more when they drive less.

Steiner occasionally offers predictions so specific that they strain credulity. He goes so far as to list the order in which the major airlines will go out of business when gas prices hit $8 a gallon (first US Airways, then United, then Delta/Northwest) and which Las Vegas resorts will close as a result of declining long-distance tourism (Good-bye, Circus Circus! Farewell, Flamingo!).

He makes up for his hyperventilated prose with vivid episodes of on-scene reporting. Near the beginning of "Chapter $10: The Car Diminished but Reborn," he describes the day he spent wearing a brown uniform and riding along with United Parcel Service driver Rene Lindain as he completed his daily delivery route in downtown Manhattan. Lindain's truck looks like any other UPS van, but it's completely battery powered -- one of two plug-in electric vehicles the company has been testing in New York City for more than four years.

Steiner gives little attention to the hardships that higher prices for food, heat, transportation, and just about everything else will impose on the segment of the population that benefits most from the "always low prices" at Wal-Mart. (The retail giant will die, he predicts, when its petroleum-dependent business model collapses as gas prices reach $14 per gallon.) A deeper problem with his neatly structured argument is that it's based on the assumption that oil prices will ratchet upward in an orderly, stepwise climb. The reality is likely to be far messier, if the recent past is any indicator. The price per gallon of regular gasoline jumped from less than $3 in early 2008 to more than $4 in June, then plummeted below $2 in November. By mid-2009, it was rising toward the $3 mark again. This kind of volatility puts the brakes on investments in greener alternatives, like mass transit or electric vehicles. Without the consistent threat of high energy prices coupled with strong policy interventions, visions like Steiner's -- of a world that's been peacefully weaned of oil before irreparable environmental damage has been done -- are science fiction.

That's the sobering message of Two Billion Cars, which is to $20 Per Gallon what An Inconvenient Truth is to Lost Horizon. Far from heading toward a green Shangri-la of abandoned superhighways, civilization is hurtling toward a disastrous doubling of its motorized vehicle count by 2020, Sperling and Gordon argue. Can the planet sustain this many cars, trucks, buses, scooters, and motorcycles? The authors answer with an unequivocal no -- at least not if the second billion employ the same technologies and follow the same growth patterns that produced the first billion.

The book's co-authors have impeccable policy-wonk credentials. Sperling is a professor of engineering and environmental science and policy at the University of California, Davis; he heads the university's Institute of Transportation Studies and serves on the California Air Resources Board. Gordon once worked as a chemical engineer at Chevron; more recently, she has served as a policy consultant for the National Commission on Energy Policy and the California Energy Commission. Their collaboration has produced a formidably dense, detailed survey of motor-vehicle technologies and fuels, past and future.

In the process, Sperling and Gordon deliver a withering indictment of corn ethanol and the powerful lobby that has assured it a prominent place in U.S. energy policy. Corn ethanol, they contend, "is expensive and provides little or no environmental benefit. The only societal benefit is a small reduction in oil imports but gained at a huge cost." That cost includes billions of dollars' worth of annual subsidies (more than $5 billion in 2006 alone, and growing). If a subsidy of this magnitude were made available more broadly, they write, lower-carbon alternative fuels such as cellulosic ethanol, as well as hydrogen fuel cells and batteries for plug-in hybrids, would actually be competitive with gasoline.

Given the harsh scrutiny they devote to corn ethanol, Sperling and Gordon are surprisingly upbeat about the prospects of a hydrogen-based transportation economy. Even the cheapest way to make hydrogen today is to extract it from natural gas, an inefficient and expensive process and one that relies on a fossil fuel. (That's one reason why the Obama administration drastically cut funding for hydrogen fuel-cell research from the Department of Energy budget.) It seems strange, too, that Sperling and Gordon barely mention alternatives like mass transit or high-speed rail. They seem intent on finding ways to reinvent vehicles so that two billion of them would not impose an unsustainable burden on the earth, rather than, say, rendering those vehicles both undesirable and unnecessary.

They devote a chapter to California's efforts to create a low-carbon energy and transportation system. Another chapter focuses on the need to spark innovation in China, which, if it follows the American car-centric model of development, could "by itself add another billion cars in the twenty-first century." China's sheer size and economic weight ensure that it will have enormous sway over global environmental and energy dynamics in the decades to come. Will it seize the opportunity to exercise heroic leadership, or succumb to forces leading it in the opposite direction?

The same could be asked of the rest of the developed world. The United States, as much as China, must reverse the momentum of past indiscretions and move in a fundamentally new direction. "Must" is easy to say, though. What are the stepping-stones? Two Billion Cars ends with a laundry list of policy prescriptions that the authors believe could nudge the United States toward their imagined version of Futurama, one that depicts a world of sustainable transportation options in 2050.

It's clear from their analysis that a blind faith in the salutary effects of higher oil prices won't get us there. Energy markets are too convoluted and irrational, and the technology of extracting more oil from existing fields is advancing too rapidly, to rely on the invisible hand of peak oil to reverse the forces causing climate change. One policy recommendation Sperling and Gordon make is to set a price floor for gasoline and diesel fuel. Doing so would "send clear price signals to consumers and industry, stimulate additional investment and innovations," and, as a side benefit, generate revenue that could be used for clean-energy R&D and investments in new mobility options.

Sheikh Ahmed Zaki Yamani, Saudi Arabia's oil minister for more than two decades, is reputed to have said in the 1970s, "The Stone Age did not end for lack of stone, and the oil age will end long before the world runs out of oil." Books like $20 Per Gallon and Two Billion Cars offer some hope that Sheikh Yamani's prediction might turn out to be right.

Atomic Pause

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

Back in 2006, when policy makers and advocates of all stripes were looking for ways to reduce carbon emissions, NRDC was pushing for the development of solar and wind. Meanwhile, the Bush administration was busy hatching the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP), a program meant to develop an international community in which partner nations, including Russia and China, would share the technological secrets of nuclear reprocessing. Reprocessing separates plutonium from spent nuclear fuel; the plutonium is then used to power other nuclear energy plants. Sounds good in theory -- who doesn't want to recycle? -- but not in practice.

NRDC and other groups, including the Union of Concerned Scientists and Physicians for Social Responsibility, were quick to speak out against reprocessing. NRDC's nuclear scientists prepared a report, "Peddling Plutonium," explaining that reprocessing is uneconomical and increases the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation (nrdc.org/nuclear/gnep/agnep.asp).

At long last, some good news arrived in June: with little fanfare, an announcement in the Federal Register informed the public that the Department of Energy cancelled the completion of the GNEP program's environmental impact statement -- a move that will delay commercial deployment of U.S. nuclear reprocessing facilities for at least 10 years. For now, the department will research new technologies to make reprocessing less expensive and improve practices designed to reduce the proliferation risks. All in all, it's a quiet victory that's worth shouting about.

The Day I Hit the Brakes

Thomas Mallon — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

I am a 57-year-old American citizen who has not driven an automobile in more than 40 years. For a large part of my adulthood I lived in Manhattan, where it was easy to make do with the subway, the bus, and the occasional taxi, but I have also lived for years in Westport, Connecticut -- as suburban and SUV-enthralled a place as you can find -- and for nine months in Lubbock, Texas, whose motorists would sometimes slow down to ask if I needed a lift.

American cars create 45 percent of the carbon dioxide that automobiles throw into the atmosphere, and it would make me feel good to say to you that in the spring of 1969, a year before the first Earth Day, I made a principled decision to help the earth by not driving a car. But it was an accident, literally. While operating our guzzling family Impala on a learner's permit, with my father in the passenger seat, I ran a stop sign. I was talking instead of paying attention, and my car was hit on the driver's side door. The accident was more mortifying than serious, but I quickly realized how serious it might have been. A sudden phobia took tenacious hold. I became too scared to drive and never got my license.

I have made it through 40 pedestrian years with a lot of walking and bicycling. I've also needed some chauffeuring, and from time to time you'll see me in the passenger seat of my partner's car. But I've never allowed myself to choose a job I couldn't reach on foot, and whatever miles and hours I've spent traveling in anybody's car amount to a small fraction of what I've spent aboard public transportation. In recent years, embarrassment over my psychological inability to drive has been partially replaced by pride. One auto didact on the Web promises that "if you begin not driving when you are 15 and end at 65, you'll have through your riding prevented the emission of 561,000 pounds of CO2." Even with chauffeuring, I've surely saved at least half that. A quarter-million pounds of lethal gas!

Alas, my self-satisfaction does not survive deeper investigation. Two summers ago the Times of London reported a set of deflating calculations undertaken by Chris Goodall, a Green Party candidate for Parliament. "Food production is now so energy intensive," the Times noted, "that more carbon is emitted providing a person with enough calories to walk to the shops than a car would emit over the same distance." For this to be true, the distances involved must be more Lubbock-like than Liverpudlian, but maybe Goodall has a point.

"Mr. Electricity" on michaelbluejay.com will give you the numbers that show flying is worse than driving, no matter how overbooked the plane. (Only a car with one person in it gets worse per-passenger mileage per gallon.) But don't try to make things better by staying home altogether. "The average home pollutes more than the average car!" warns Mr. Electricity, thanks to the fuel we burn to produce his namesake. If you truly want to be helpful, he suggests going vegan. (But does one drive -- with friends -- or walk to pick up the radicchio?)

The warring statistics and calculations can bewilder: one report makes you feel like a model citizen, the next a public enemy. But taken together, they still confirm one's worst instincts about the automobile, if only by the frequency with which they draw a comparison to driving. Last April, ICF International warned of the significant environmental damage done by the Internet's daily tsunamis of spam. Filtering out the spam higher up in the food chain, before the rest of us have to spend energy deleting it, would save "the electrical equivalent of taking 13 million cars off the road per year," notes Elinor Mills of CNET. The car is almost always the odious yardstick, and to my mind that makes sense. As the symbol and means of personal freedom, it should also be the number-one measure of personal responsibility.

When a cow burps in Vermont or a breath of luscious air-conditioning pours from the vents inside my house, I don't notice it. But when I'm doing my occasional Pontius Pilate act in the passenger seat (hey, it's not like I'm really driving), I do see the damage, or at least its smoky agent, all around me. By living life on foot and in the HOV lane, I must have done at least some good, enough to make me regard that long-ago accident of mine as a piece of luck: I actually did hit the brakes.

Jobs That Help Ohio - and the Rest of the Planet

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

This summer I traveled to Cleveland to talk with community leaders about clean energy. With its shuttered auto-parts factories, Ohio shows signs of its rust belt past. But the state is beginning to channel its traditional strengths -- an existing manufacturing base and a well-trained workforce -- into the burgeoning economic opportunities of green energy.

The wind industry, for instance, grew 40 percent annually from 2005 until 2008. After a slowdown in financing, the renewable energy incentives in President Barack Obama's economic stimulus package could make 2010 the strongest year yet. That is excellent news for the 90 Ohio companies that manufacture bearings, generators, and fasteners for wind turbines.

But it's not just Ohio. As I write this, the Senate is considering a groundbreaking bill that would dramatically expand the market for green technologies nationwide. The House passed a similar bill in June. Still, we have a tough fight ahead in the Senate. The key to victory is showing our senators that confronting global warming goes hand in hand with economic growth and job creation. In this respect, Ohio is an excellent bellwether. With the state's conventional industries shedding jobs, new, green opportunities offer a lifeline to struggling workers. The Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst has estimated that Ohio could produce 67,000 green jobs (nationwide that figure could reach 1.7 million), from weatherizing homes to installing solar panels.

That's why NRDC and other environmental groups have joined forces with several unions -- including the United Steelworkers, the Service Employees International Union, and the American Federation of Teachers -- to form the Blue Green Alliance, which is working to pass a strong climate bill in the Senate. Clean-tech entrepreneurs, whether they run solar companies in Ohio or venture capital firms in Silicon Valley, also view clean energy legislation as a powerful economic engine. Leveraging this broad spectrum of allies, NRDC has gone to Capitol Hill with Fortune 500 CEOs and labor leaders to urge lawmakers to pass this bill.

Scientists at MIT recently concluded that temperatures are likely to rise faster than previously thought -- 9 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century instead of 4 degrees. There is no time to waste. The bill before the Senate will get America moving toward job creation, sustainable prosperity, and climate solutions. Tell your senators to pass it now.

Work Hard, Fly Right

Sophie Lubin — Wed, 31 Dec 1969 18:00:00 -0600

Sick of burning time, money, and fossil fuel at the airport? So are the airlines. To improve overall efficiency, the industry has begun to implement what is called the Required Navigation Performance protocol, which marries GPS technology with traditional flight mapping and monitoring to guide planes along shorter and more fuel-efficient paths. Southwest Airlines estimates that the protocol will lead to fuel savings of at least 6 percent.

NRDC: The China Challenge

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

NRDC's China program was launched in 1996. Based in Beijing, Jingjing Qian directs the organization's work on smart growth and advanced energy technologies.

China's goals for renewable energy development are quite ambitious. but are they realistic?

The target is to supply 15 percent of China's energy needs in 2020 from renewables, including hydropower. So far the plan looks likely to achieve its goals. China has three main strategies. First, boost investment in renewables, which has already risen from $6 billion in 2005 to $15.6 billion in 2008; second, provide incentives such as subsidies for solar photovoltaics and above-market rates (known as feed-in tariffs) for electricity from solar and biomass; and third, promote local manufacture of renewable energy hardware to cut capital costs. For example, at least 70 percent of the equipment used in wind farms must be made in China.

What else is China doing to address climate change, now that it has become the world's top emitter of greenhouse gases (GHG)?

Indeed China's unprecedented economic growth has led it to join the US as the world leaders in GHG emissions, although it is still much lower in terms of historic cumulative emissions and per capita emissions. The Chinese government has recognized the potentially serious impact that climate change will have on its citizens, its economy and the environment. In addition to the renewables push, it has instituted several major programs to improve the energy efficiency of China's industries, buildings, appliances and vehicles. The central government has set a goal of reducing its energy intensity (energy consumed per unit GDP) by 20 percent from 2005 levels by 2010, particularly by improving the efficiency of its top 1000 energy consuming industrial enterprises. It has also adopted more stringent energy efficiency standards and labels covering most home and office appliances and national building codes. It has stricter automobile fuel efficiency standards than the US, and is investing in electric vehicle development and the world's largest high-speed rail network. However, compliance with environmental and energy standards in China is often a challenge; that is why NRDC has been working with China's government agencies and local NGO partners on building stronger capacities in monitoring and reporting of environmental and energy efficiency standards, as well as on improving information disclosure and public participation.

What can we expect from China at the Copenhagen climate talks in December?

Still a developing country, China has both a modern, urban side to it and over 20 million people living in absolute poverty and twice as much with very modest means. Thus, the Chinese government has made economic growth a continued priority for the coming decades. But China has now understood that it needs to balance economic development with environmental protection and to do more to address climate change. China feels its aggressive efforts on renewables and energy efficiency offer a significant contribution to the fight on climate change, and it will be willing to take more steps short of a cap on its emissions if sufficient financial assistance and technology transfer from developed countries are forthcoming to help it and other developing countries pursue a low-carbon development path. China has openly expressed that it wants a successful climate agreement to come out of Copenhagen as much as the US.

What scope exists for U.S.-China cooperation on climate, energy, and environmental issues in general?

There are many ways that the U.S. and China could cooperate to address climate, energy and environmental pollution. We recently suggested four potentially fruitful areas for cooperation on building energy rating and labeling systems, carbon capture and storage demonstration projects, energy efficiency resource standards that require investing in efficiency as a resource, and sharing best practices on collecting and reporting energy and emissions data. Because the U.S. has had a few decades head start to build up its environmental protection system, China could also learn from the U.S. approach to regulating air and water pollution, both the good and the bad.

The conclusion of Mara Hvistendahl's story is that much of the impulse for change in China comes from the local level. Do you agree with that? And do you see examples of that in NRDC's work in China?

In China, the central government sets the overall targets for renewables, energy efficiency, pollution reduction, etc., in its Five-Year Plan, and provides major policy frameworks for achieving these targets. Line ministries and provincial governments then formulate their respective five-year plans based on and consistent with the national one. Local officials are judged based on their performance not only in increasing GDP, but also more and more on their performance in reaching efficiency and emissions reduction targets. So change can certainly come at the local levels, and experimentation by local governments -- for example, in developing "eco-cities" or programs that improve efficiency such as the demand side management industrial efficiency program we have been working on with Jiangsu province and California -- can serve as the basis for national level policies.

For the Birds

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

In southern Texas, the Peñascal Wind Farm sits in the midst of one of North America's primary waterfowl migration flyways. During migration season, birds cross the sky above the spinning turbines at a rate of up to 4,000 an hour. To reduce collisions between geese and giant rotating blades, the company employs radar-based sensors to scan the skies for approaching birds. The technology, developed for NASA, can detect a migrating flock from up to four miles away, pinpointing its altitude as well as its density. If the birds are headed for trouble, the turbines are shut down.

Just Food

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Sea Less Hospitable to Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

NRDC: Combining New and Old

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

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

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

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

Why is it important to name and describe species?

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

Why focus on protecting species rather than ecosystems?

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

What are the greatest threats to species?

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

How is global warming going to affect biodiversity?

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

Happy Birthday to Us - 30 Years and Counting

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

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

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

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

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

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