The Blue Marble: April 2008 Archives

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April 30, 2008

Creationists Flunk Masters Degree

Hallelujah. Rationality returns. A religious group has been rejected in its bid to offer a Master of Science degree. The Institute for Creation Research, which backs a literal interpretation of the Bible, including the creation of Earth in six days, seeks a certificate to grant online degrees in science education in Texas, reports Nature. But the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board voted unanimously last week not to pass the request, following the recommendation of Raymund Paredes, the state's commissioner of higher education. "Religious belief is not science," Paredes said… Amen.

Julia Whitty is Mother Jones' environmental correspondent, lecturer, and 2008 winner of the Kiriyama Prize and the John Burroughs Medal Award. You can read from her new book, The Fragile Edge, and other writings, here.

Bring Back the Bison

Want to see bison back in the North American landscape? It's not only possible but could be achieved in only 100 years, says a coalition of scientists, conservationists, ranchers, and Native Americans/First Nations peoples. Bison are a keystone species in this continent's natural history and could repopulate large areas from Alaska to Mexico, including grasslands, prairies, mountains, taiga and deserts. The continent-wide assessment, published in Conservation Biology, is based on a "conservation scorecard" evaluating the availability of existing habitat. The goal is ecological restoration of bison, defined as large herds of plains and wood bison moving freely across extensive landscapes within historic ranges, interacting with other native species (elk, bear, wolves, prairie dogs, birds), as well as inspiring, sustaining and connecting human cultures. It will likely take a century, says the Wildlife Conservation Society, and will only be realized through collaboration with a broad range of public, private and indigenous partners.

Bison once numbered in the tens of millions but were wiped out by commercial hunting and habitat loss. By 1889 fewer than 1,100 animals survived. Of the estimated 500,000 bison alive today, 20,000 are wild, the rest live on private ranches— awaiting liberation back into the wild.

Cheney: 300 Endangered Whales Is 300 Too Many

Hot on the heels of a GAO report detailing the Bush administration's assault on the EPA, this little tidbit pops up.

Cheney's office has been delaying attempts to issue speed limits near the habitat of the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale for FOUR YEARS. There are only about 300 right whales alive today, and ship collisions are their leading cause of death. As Henry Waxman wrote in his letter to the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, "the death of even a single whale, particularly a breeding female, may contribute to the extinction of the species."

Despite clear evidence linking higher boat speeds with increased whale mortality, Cheney's office has gone so far as to conduct their own analyses of data (using untested methods, NOAA scientists noted) to delay a ruling on the speed limits. The office contended that NOAA had "no evidence (i.e. hard data) that lowering the speeds of 'large ships' will actually make a difference." NOAA has quickly rebutted these objections, noting that they've conducted statistical analysis of ship strike records and have published peer-reviewed literature on the subject. They also conduct calf counts.

Why Cheney's office is going to such extremes to delay this ruling is up for debate. On one hand, there are shipping companies that want to make a few extra bucks speeding through a critical habitat. On the other hand, there's a unique species that might be wiped off the face of the earth forever. Hmmm, which to choose.

April 25, 2008

Pro-Nuke? Anti-Nuke? Talk About It With the Experts

We asked a futurist, a MoJo writer, a No Nukes activist, and a weapons security expert:

What is nuclear energy's place in the future mix of energy sources?

They'll be checking in on this Blue Marble entry starting Monday to discuss their controversial answers with readers—and each other. Want to talk to Stewart Brand, Judith Lewis, Jonas Siegel, or Harvey Wasserman about their take on nukes? Now's your chance. Leave a comment below for one of the four guest Blue Marble moderators and they'll respond.

Stewart Brand is a futurist with the Global Business Network and founder of the Whole Earth Catalog:

I expect that nuclear will grow slowly but steadily in the mix for a couple decades, because it's a mature technology that provides baseload electricity with minimum carbon emissions. Where it goes after that depends on the rapidity of climate change; the rapidity of other high capacity energy technologies such as space solar, massive electrical storage, high-tech microbe farming, etc; and the usefulness of further nuclear technology, such as decentralized nuclear "batteries," cheaper reprocessing, fusion, etc. By mid-century or later, depending on how all those work out, nuclear could be heading toward a majority role, like in France now; or it could be headed toward a phase-out by the end of the century, replaced by better things; or the question could seem irrelevant in the face of drastic climate events forcing huge-scale geo-engineering and/or enormous human dieback in the face of collapsing carrying capacity.

Judith Lewis wrote "The Nuclear Option" for the May/June 2008 issue of Mother Jones:

Nuclear energy is far from environmentally benign, but it does have one significant advantage over coal-fired electricity generation: It does not emit carbon dioxide. Even taking into account nuclear's entire lifecycle, from mining to refining to enrichment of uranium, from plant construction to startup to waste, it adds far less carbon to the atmosphere than coal or natural gas do, and sometimes even beats solar generation. If we accept that catastrophic climate change caused by a buildup of carbon in the atmosphere is our most urgent environmental problem, we should at least consider replacing the coal-fired power that provides half the nation's electricity with nuclear energy (which currently provides only a fifth).

But while we consider it, we also have to understand that the nuclear industry also has a lot of problems associated with it, including a compromised federal monitoring agency, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. And then there's the waste: It's becoming ever more clear as the Department of Energy moves ahead with its plans to build a nuclear waste repository in a mountain of porous volcanic rock on earthquake fault that the DOE and Congress made a very bad decision when it chose Yucca Mountain. There needs to be much more public involvement in the process of choosing such sites.

The same goes for just about every part of the nuclear industry's operations. The industry does seemed poised for a renaissance, and it might deserve one. But if the renaissance happens, people in the U.S. need to get as much information as they can handle about nuclear power; only public participation can force industry and government regulators to do their jobs right.

Jonas Siegel is editor of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, a media organization that focuses on the intersection of science and security, and has covered nuclear weapons and energy issues for the past five years Jonas%20Siegel%20head%20shot.jpg :

Since its inception, nuclear energy has earned legions of supporters. The enormous amount of energy contained in a small amount of nuclear fuel—a pound of uranium 235 has more than 2 million times the energy content of a pound of coal—alone inspired visions of grandeur. Despite its potential, nuclear energy has not overcome a range of risks—safety, nuclear proliferation, and waste—to sustain its growth in the marketplace. If nuclear is going to be a part of the world’s future mix of energy sources, it needs to address these risks head on—and compete economically with other sources.

Harvey Wasserman is a No Nukes activist, the author of Solartopia! Our Green Powered Earth, and edits Nukefree.org:

Nuclear power has no place in our future mix of energy sources except as a costly and dangerous curse from previous bad decision-making. The Peaceful Atom is humankind's most expensive technological failure. To "revisit" this corporate boondoggle is to ignore 50 years of staggering losses. Economically, there is no reason to believe a "new generation" of reactors will be any less disastrous than the last one. The radioactive fuel chain is a major cause of global warming. The ecological, public health and safety aspects of unsolved problems with terrorism, human design and operator error, "routine" radioactive emissions, impossible spent fuel transport and management, weapons proliferation and much more make atomic energy the "Titanic" of energy generation. A dollar invested in efficiency saves seven times the energy a dollar invested in nukes can produce. Wind and solar are already proven and cheaper. Let's do that instead of re-running the same radioactive horror show.

The Problem With Nuclear: No Uranium

Nuclear foes have long cited environmental damage as a key reason to oppose atomic power. But even pro-nukes folks may have trouble supporting nuclear power in the future, since a new report shows that high-grade uranium ore, the raw material that powers nuclear plants, is steadily declining worldwide. In fact, uranium supplies have been waning for about 50 years and the situation will only get worse as more power plants go online in the near future, requiring more fuel.

Most uranium is now mined in Australia, Niger, Canada, and some former Soviet bloc countries. But as their supplies dwindle, raw uranium deposits will likely be located deeper, of lower quality, and harder to extract. This would, the scientists involved say, make nuclear power more environmentally damaging by increasing the amount of mining, digging, and refining necessary to create enriched uranium.

"Over time, as ore grades decline and more energy is required for uranium production, this will lead to a higher carbon intensity for nuclear power, eventually becoming similar to gas-fired electricity," said Gavin Mudd, the Australian Monash University environmental engineer who conducted the study.

You can read more about nuclear's carbon footprint here. And for an overview of nuclear resurgence in the U.S., check out our current feature article, "The Nuclear Option."

April 23, 2008

Carbonfund.org: Seattle Man Offsets Entire Life; Onion: Please Give Our Headline Back

A typical American life offers no shortage of carbon sins to offset. Eco-conscious consumers can offset their air travel, their weddings, even their offspring. But so far, no one (that we know of, anyway) has gone whole hog and offset everything they've emitted, ever.

Enter Brad Mewhort, 33-year-old vegan, pedestrian, and apologetic air traveler. Earlier this month, carbon offset nonprofit Carbonfund.org announced that that the Seattle sales rep had just finished scrubbing his imprint from the Earth by donating the last $1,500 of a $3,000 contribution to the group. The three grand covers emissions even from family car trips when Mewhort was young, as well as all of the plane trips he must take for his job, and the recent journey to Antarctica that convinced him it was time to take action.

"I was absolutely amazed by what I saw there," says Mewhort. "It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I love penguins, I always have, and they're more incredible than I expected. Their habitat is directly threatened by the impacts of human activity. I decided that I don't want to be personally contributing to this destruction. I decided to purchase offsets as soon as I could."

Mewhort explains that he calculates his emissions annually, and that he will continue to do so for the rest of his life. Though he doesn't have a family, he says that if he were to have one, he would feel obligated to offset their emissions as well. How much might this cost over the course of a lifetime? The UN estimates the average American emits more than 3 million pounds of carbon over an average 78-year lifespan. It's tough to say whether Mewhort's emissions will be lower or higher—on the one hand, he's taken a number of steps to minimize his own emissions; on the other, he has no way of knowing what he might emit in the future, and any number of factors could come into play. In addition, although he has specified that his money go towards renewable energy projects, Carbonfund.org does not provide detailed explanations of how the projects work or update Mewhort on their progress.

Mewhort says he knows that offsets are only one tactic, but that he hopes other people will see it as a feasible one. "It's not just offsetting that amount of carbon, it's also putting money into an area that could have larger benefits," he says. "It's better than doing nothing."

Photo used under a Creative Commons license from cloudsoup.

—Casey Miner

Wal-Mart Rations Rice

Shoot! You were planning a rice-and-beans dinner party for 100, and you thought for sure your local Wal-Mart would meet all your bulk rice needs.

Think again. Because of rising rice prices around the globe and worries about shortages, the biggest big box has announced that it will ration long grain, jasmine, and basmati rice, allowing customers to purchase only four bags per visit.

Since the beginning of 2008, rice prices have risen 68 percent worldwide. This is one of the main reasons that food riots have broken out recently all over the developing world.

Saint Louis Meriska's children ate two spoonfuls of rice apiece as their only meal recently and then went without any food the following day. His eyes downcast, his own stomach empty, the unemployed father said forlornly, "They look at me and say, 'Papa, I'm hungry,' and I have to look away. It's humiliating and it makes you angry."

In light of this two-spoonfuls anecdote, Wal-Mart's four-bag limit sounds downright decadent, but rice rationing in the U.S. means that whatever is going on with supply and demand trends is not good. Once land-o'-plenty retailers start fretting about global food shortages, you can be sure it's time to worry.

Will Low-Carbon Diets Catch On?

Britain's largest food retailer, Tesco, says it's going to start putting carbon footprint labels on food in its stores next month. Although the "carbon labels" will only be on food produced under Tesco's own brand name, it will be the first time a major food retailer has made such a move. Tesco worked with the Carbon Trust to find a way to calculate foods' footprints and create the labels. "It has not been simple, but we are there," said Tesco CEO Sir Terry Leahy. Leahy said details will be revealed and he hopes Tesco's labels "will end up being a standard."

Stateside, the LA Times reports that 400 college eateries serviced by Bon Appetit Management Co. will be able to provide a "low carbon diet" to students. One sign posted at a "low carbon" college cafe had a sign posted saying "Cows or cars? Worldwide, livestock emits 18% of greenhouse gases, more than the transportation sector! Today we're offering great-tasting vegetarian choices." Translation: no hamburgers today.

There have been a few disgruntled students, but Bon Appetit aims to reduce its carbon footprint by 25% by serving more vegetarian entrees and less beef, lamb, and cheese. This may sound like a small change, but if Bon Appétit's parent company also went low-carbon, it would affect 8,000 locations lincluding sports arenas, public schools, and hospitals.

April 22, 2008

Ahoy, Plastics!

As Mother Jones reported last October, bisphenol A, a chemical used in the production of plastics, is under serious scrutiny for mimicking the role of estrogen. And last Monday, the government’s National Toxicology Program released a damning draft brief on the potential endocrine disruptor. As a result, last week saw a number of new companies distance themselves from BPA; most notably the iconic water bottle manufacturer Nalgene will pull bottles made with the chemical. By the end of the week, Canada announced a "precautionary and prudent" ban on the sale of baby bottles with BPA.

One of the issues at hand is that the U.S. alone produces bisphenol A at a staggering rate of billions of pounds per year—2004 saw 2.3 billion pounds produced—for use in nonbiodegradable polycarbonate plastics and epoxy. So even if a few companies, or even a few countries, ban the substance, we still have to deal with an absurd amount of lingering, toxic particles. And since BPA doesn't biodegrade, where does it all go?

Vice Broadcasting Service (VBS)—the broadcasting arm of the bohemian magazine known for publishing provocative articles like “The Vice Guide to Shagging Muslims”—gives an entertaining, albeit disheartening answer. As part of their Toxic series, VBS sent host Thomas Morton on a three week voyage to uncover what happens to our discarded plastic goods and the chemicals they're made with. The result is a refreshingly serious diary, though still loaded with enough cynical wit to capture the attention of our spastic youth.

In "Garbage Island,” Morton and his team join forces with ocean advocate and seadog Capt. Charles Moore on a quest to discover a mythical floating island of waste, the home of discarded plastics, described as twice the size of Texas. Moore, who has made numerous trips in pursuit of trash “accumulation zones,” is a die-hard environmentalist.

The entire 12 episodes are interesting and worthwhile, at times sad and funny, but I found the most impact comes as the crew begins to internalize the true, troubling significance of our wasteful convenience culture. As everything from planter boxes to helmets float alongside their vessel, Moore explains how plastic toxins, like bisphenol A, first accumulate in jellyfish and then work their way up the food chain into our bodies. So even as companies earn public praise for pulling BPA products from the shelves, the animal kingdom, including us, still faces years and years of toxin-induced disease.

—Jesse Finfrock

Eco-Barbie? Mattel Gives This 'Green' Thingamajig a Whirl

When I first saw the press release about a "green" Mattel collection of accessories called Barbie BCause, I thought it was an April Fool's joke. Apparently not. Mattel's new "playful and on-trend" collection of hats and bags for young girls will be released "just in time to celebrate Earth Day in style." Which is pretty ironic, really, given that Barbie dolls themselves are made out of plastic and are packaged in even more plastic. And not the kind of plastic you can throw in the recycling bin, either.

Thankfully, the limited edition Barbie BCause assortment of accessories doesn't include a real doll. What it does include are brightly-colored, patch-work style bags, backpacks, pillows and totes. All the items are made out of "excess fabric and trimmings from other Barbie doll fashions and products which would otherwise be discarded," says Mattel's press release.

While I'm all in favor of teaching young girls the values of being green, I'm not so sure Mattel's new doll really offers "eco-conscious girls a way to make an environmentally-friendly fashion statement." It feels more like they found a way to make money off of scrap fabric than genuinely created a collection aimed at reducing their environmental impact. If Mattel really wants to be green, why not reduce the ridiculous amount of packaging they use for displaying their dolls? Why not only sell the collection at eco-conscious retailers instead of exclusively at Toys "R" Us? Oh right, because it's Barbie.

Interview with Al Gore's Climate Ad Gurus

Early this month Vice President Al Gore and a nonprofit climate group launched what they say will be a three-year, $300 million advertising campaign to convince the American public of the need for legislation to address climate change. The campaign, a project of the Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection, uses slick national TV ads to encourage people to sign up as online activists. So far, three ads have aired and more than one million people have joined. Mother Jones recently spoke with Alliance spokesman Brian Hardwick.

Mother Jones: How do you think the campaign can make a difference?
Brian Hardwick: This campaign is unprecedented in scale among issue advocacy efforts. In the past, this issue hasn't had the benefit of a commercial-scale campaign. The second thing is, we have available to us all the tools of mobilization that the online space also provides. So we can inspire people and connect with them emotionally though television advertisements but we also have a way to engage people in the movement that we previously didn't have. When we get people to sign up [online], then we turn them into climate activists.

MJ: Who do you hope to reach?
BH: It's really targeted at Americans from all walks of life. That's why we're doing the advertising in a mass way like this. We want to reach people who have been active already on the climate issue, and then those who maybe have changed a light bulb and are driving a hybrid car but don't know what the next step is, and then people who are just becoming aware of the issue. It really is saying to all Americans that doing those things in your personal life are important, but frankly to really solve this it is going to take enough of us coming together and demanding from leaders and business and government that they put the laws in place to ignite a new economy. We need a real shift in public opinion and activism so that we can say to our leaders: we're ready to solve it.

MJ: Elsewhere you've said you are trying to reach "influentials."
BH: The thing about this influencer target, they're not your typical opinion elite. These are people who talk to a lot of people every day, they are people who know what's on the cutting edge of news, they know who got voted off American Idol last week, they are the types of people who know what the fashion trends are. We are really looking for ways to accelerate a big budget but frankly a budget that we wish was a whole lot bigger than that.

MJ: Is there a particular Madison Avenue campaign that you are modeling this on?
BH: Not a particular one, although there is a long list of social issues, from the anti-littering campaign to the "This is your brain on drugs" campaign to the Truth Anti-Smoking campaign to the crash test dummies on seat belts—there have been social issues that have had television-commercial scale, but we are combining that with all of the online tools. We are doing a ton of online advertising as well as print advertising. So we are kind of taking the best practices that we've learned from those social marketing exercises and the cutting edge methodologies that are out there for consumer marketing and kind of putting those together in this effort.

MJ: Who is involved from the ad world?
BH: Our agency is the Martin Agency out of Richmond, Virginia. They have been made famous recently by making the Geico ads that include the Geico gecko and the cave men ads. They also do the ads for UPS—"What can brown do for you?"—and the UPS white board. They are considered one of the hottest creative shops in the country right now and have some really memorable advertisements out there.

MJ: What kind of parallels do you see between their past work and what you want them to do?
BH: I think that they have a real sense of helping people connect with brands in the consumer world and they also have a really good sense of making commercials that are memorable and get talked about. I think the Geico ads are an example of that. These are ads that people talk about around the water cooler, and frankly, they didn't have much to do with car insurance, except that they're good at driving simple messages: it's so easy a cave man can do it. And they are very good at direct response marketing. They say "Call 1-800, get a free quote, take three minutes." Our whole thing is driving people to WeCanSolveIt.org, and so you'll see that feature in all our advertising.

MJ: Your first ad featured scenes of major American conflicts and achievements—civil rights protests, an astronaut landing on the moon. Explain how you see the ad working.
BH: From the very beginning we wanted to both communicate the urgency of the climate crisis—that we need to act now, because that's what the scientists tell us—but also that we can solve this, that the solutions are out there, we just need to get behind them. What we are evoking in this first spot is the sense that in these key moments in history, Americans didn't wait. We didn't wait four more months to go into Normandy; we went in when we had to. We went to the moon. We took on civil rights. When Americans come together in a big way they also get great things done. That's the spirit that we're tapping into, but the other thing we are saying is that we can solve the climate crisis. We are issuing an invitation saying, "Join us." Everybody has heard a lot about the problem. We really want to get in there and start talking about solutions.

MJ: What other kinds of ads can we expect?
BH: The next set of ads will pair people who don't agree on virtually anything but do agree that we need to act on the climate crisis. The point being: for too long environmental issues have been polarized or politicized. Really this is an issue that impacts all of us and we need to not look at it through a typical partisan lens, or a lens that says, "You're on this side or you're on that side." This is an issue where we've got to put our differences aside and act quickly. So you'll see Pat Robertson with Al Sharpton, Nancy Pelosi with Newt Gingrich, Toby Keith and Natalie Maines from the Dixie Chicks. You'll see people who you don't expect to see together saying, "We don't agree on anything, but we do agree on this." The point there is to really call on Americans to look at this issue differently than a lot of environmental issues.

MJ: How will the online component play out?
BH: The online component is the hub of our campaign. WeCanSolveIt.org is an easy way for people to get involved and stay involved in ways that make sense for them. We're going to have activism from your own house all the way up to the White House.

MJ: How deeply do you plan to drill into the policy issues?
BH: We're not a lobbying organization. We think the best niche we can fill is really starting to engage people in a way that will demonstrate to leaders that there is real demand out in the public for action, and we think that provides the fodder that other groups need to convince lawmakers that it's time to act.

MJ: Are we going to see any cameos by Al Gore or "Inconvenient Truth" references?
BH: We are just going to roll out the ads as we get them done. We're not going to project on what may or may not happen down the road.

MJ: Are you worried that you will be outspent by groups on the other side?
BH: We know they will be advocating for their position as well. Ultimately, we think our arguments are stronger. It will cost us more if we don't act. You can't let people tell you that it's bad for the economy to begin to start trying to solve the climate crisis, because ultimately what we can build is a new economy, jobs of the 21st century that are driven by American innovation. We could actually lead the world in the same way that we did with the Internet and technology boom and frankly with the Industrial Revolution. This is a country that has constantly risen to the economic challenges of the future. There are people right now who are laid off from mills in Western Pennsylvania who are now working at factories making wind turbines. That is happening across America and we are going to tell those stories.

Boeing, Airbus Agree to Reduce Aviation's Environmental Impact

Today, two of the world's largest aircraft manufacturers played nice for the camera at the third annual Aviation & Environment Summit in Geneva, Switzerland. Boeing president and CEO Scott Carson and Tom Enders, his Airbus counterpart, signed a document pledging their companies' to work together to enlist the help of the U.S. and various European governments to reduce air travel's carbon emissions. This would primarily be accomplished, say the executives, through modernization of air traffic management systems.

The move is not altogether surprising, given that the price of oil now hovers around $117 per barrel—higher for airlines, which rely on more costly jet fuel. The aviation business is scrambling to improve efficiency (translation: cut costs) by whatever means necessary. (Just consider that the fact that a mixed drink in flight now costs five bucks—exact change, please!—and that five leading airlines now plan to charge passengers twenty-five dollars for a second checked bag.)

The Boeing/Airbus agreement, if successful in modernizing air traffic management systems, could reduce carbon emissions by 10-12 percent in Europe alone, according to Agence France-Presse. "We set a good example and hopefully it will be exportable on how to organize air traffic management," says Enders.

Although the Boeing/Airbus announcement has gotten more press attention, the Geneva summit itself also led to noteworthy environmental pledges from the world's leading aviation organizations. From Agence France-Presse:

Both Airbus and Boeing also joined other industry leaders, including the head of international airline body IATA at the summit, to sign a declaration to adopt several strategies against pollution.

The declaration signed by 13 organisations acknowledged that the industry has a responsibility for the environment.

The declaration commits the industry to the development and application of new technologies, to fuel efficiency, improvement of air routes, traffic management and airport infrastructure.

The signatories also committed themselves to a reduction of gas emissions.

In addition, the declaration urges governments to support and co-finance research and development, and to develop a framework for global management of emissions under the International Civil Aviation Organization.

The measures mentioned above also form the core of the International Air Transport Association's goal of making the industry 25 percent more fuel efficient by 2020 and carbon neutral by 2050.

(To read my recent piece about Boeing and Virgin Atlantic's attempts to power a commercial jet with sustainable biofuels, click here.)

Photo used under a Creative Commons license from Cubbie_n_Vegas*.

Growing Up Nuclear: Author Kelly McMasters Tells Her Story

The following is a guest blog post by Kelly McMasters, author of Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir From an Atomic Town. The book, which hits stores this week, recounts McMasters' childhood in the beautiful town of Shirley, bucolic home to nuclear power plants and, later, to cancer clusters and polluted waterways.

I grew up in a blue-collar town on the east end of Long Island. Just north of the town, the Brookhaven National Laboratory, a federal nuclear facility, sits deep within a thick forest of towering pine trees. As a child, I imagined the lab’s buildings were made of an igloo-like substance, and the rooms inside were full of metallic file cabinets, clinking glass test tubes, and notebooks full of secret codes. Men and women in crisp white lab coats and plastic goggles coaxed new species of frogs and lizards out of mottled purple eggs. Others hovered over milky glass globes of light whose kinked antennas sparked blue shots of electricity into the dim, silent air. My neighbor worked as a maintenance man at the lab, and he often teased that he glowed in the dark. After he died of brain and lung cancer, my imaginary lab became a much darker place—a small, sinister pocket hiding in the pines.

The lab—which the kids knew had something to do with nuclear reactors, although we weren’t quite sure what that meant—existed mainly in our minds because of the thick forest of towering pine trees surrounding it. The Long Island Pine Barrens envelops the 5,300-acre Brookhaven Laboratory property, acting as a barrier and isolating the lab from the rest of Long Island. Old military-style gates from its days as Camp Upton, an army induction center active during the world wars, keep everyone but those with official business out.

Unfortunately, since Long Island is basically a jumbo sand bar, the natural barriers—the air and soil and water table—are harder to control. A Superfund site since 1989, with soil and drinking water contaminated with Cesium 137, Plutonium 239, Radium 226, and Europium 154, as well as underground plumes of tritium stretching out towards my town, the lab sits on top of one of the largest sole-source drinking water aquifers in the country, serving more than 3 million people on the island.

The waste came from accidents, spills, and irresponsible practices over the course of 50 years. In 1960, nuclear waste from the first of three nuclear reactors was accidentally pumped into a drinking water well instead of the ﬁll pipe of an underground holding tank. During some experiments to produce neutrons, the reactor also leaked radioactive slurry into the soil and groundwater. The reactor, aging and unreliable, was shut down in 1968. Leftover radioactive material from the reactor was sealed in the boxy building. Seventy layers of contaminated graphite blocks are contained in a cube measuring twenty-ﬁve feet on each side. It would take 300,000 years for the radioactive material to reach levels safe enough for human interaction. That’s longer than Long Island itself has even existed.

In 1960, meanwhile, Shirley was the fastest-growing community in Suffolk County—the year-round population of the town more than doubled in the short span of ten years. The Atomic Energy Commission and the scientists themselves could have taken a look around and realized they were no longer on their own in the middle of the wilderness. A few hundred feet beyond the military-style gates of the 5,000-acre compound, newly arrived families were raking leaves, washing cars, tending vegetable gardens. Once the first reactor had cracked open and leaked, and once that reactor had been decommissioned, the officials could have looked back at their founding documents and reminded themselves that they were originally intended to operate ten miles away from any populous area. They could have packed up, or they could have recognized that the homes and neighborhoods sprouting up around their compound were too close to chance the radioactive nature of the work they were conducting and continued with only the non-nuclear experiments. But none of this happened.

I visited the laboratory two summers ago. After a half-day tour of the campus, I looked around the antiseptic lobby at the visiting children twittering around happily, toting their new Brookhaven National Laboratory coloring books and candy-colored helium balloons printed with that Jetsonish atomic swirl symbol. Our group dispersed, and we walked out of the main building, which released us with the whispered whoosh of pneumatic doors. There was an ice cream truck parked next to the building, and an overweight bus driver on his break leaned against his yellow charge, a cigarette in one hand and a soft-serve cone in the other. A line of people stood in front of the ice cream truck, its off-key plinking echoing into the parking lot, and I shivered in the August heat. The blue of the sky was sharp against the scattering of ash-colored buildings. Above the tops of the trees, I could see the slender tips of the decommissioned reactors’ smokestacks. They were sand-colored, and the bright red stripes that circled their tips looked like strings tied around someone’s ﬁngers, reminding them of something they otherwise would have forgotten.

April 21, 2008

Food Miles & Your Carbon Footprint

The number of miles your food travels from farm to plate makes a difference in your personal climate-change footprint. But not as much as eating red meat and dairy, which are responsible for nearly half of all food-related greenhouse gas emissions for an average U.S. household. New research published in Environmental Science & Technology finds it's how food is produced, not how far it's transported, that matters most for global warming. Christopher Weber and Scott Matthews of Carnegie Mellon University conducted a life-cycle assessment of greenhouse gases emitted during all stages of growing and transporting food. They found transportation creates only 11% of the 8.1 metric tons of greenhouse gases that an average U.S. household generates annually from food consumption. The agricultural and industrial practices that go into growing and harvesting food create 83%.

Switching to a totally local diet is equivalent to driving about 1000 miles less per year. Yet a relatively small dietary shift can accomplish about the same. Replacing red meat and dairy with chicken, fish, or eggs for one day per week reduces emissions equal to 760 miles per year of driving, say the study's authors. And switching to vegetables one day per week cuts the equivalent of driving 1160 miles per year.

Why not all of the above? Though there are other factors to consider when we choose our foods, everything from the ecological costs of hunting wildlife (fish), to fertilizer runoff and oceanic dead zones (dairy), to cruelty issues (eggs). As always, and as your mama said, veggies rule.

April 16, 2008

How Fishing Screws With Ecosystems

Fishing provokes volatile fluctuations in the targeted populations, though no one really knows why or how. Until now. Researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography have found that current methods of fishing decapitate the "age pyramid:" lopping off the few large, older fish who make up the top of the pyramid and leaving a broad base of faster growing small fish. This rapidly growing base is unstable, a finding with profound implications for fisheries management. The reason being that even though fishing typically extracts the larger members, fishing regulations often impose minimum size limits to protect the younger fishes.

For example: Imagine a container of water with one 500-pound fish. With food, it grows a little bigger. Without food it gets a bit smaller. Imagine the same container with 500 one-pound fish. They eat, reproduce and the resulting thousands of fish boom, quickly outstripping the resources and the population crashes. These many smaller fish—with the same initial biomass as the larger fish—can’t average out the environmental fluctuations, and in fact amplify them through higher turnover rates that promote boom and bust cycles.

"The type of regulation which we see in many sport fisheries is exactly wrong," said George Sugihara of Scripps. "It’s not the young ones that should be thrown back, but the larger, older fish that should be spared. Not only do the older fish provide stability and capacitance to the population, they provide more and better quality offspring." These more valuable (to the ecosystem) older fish are what some researchers have called the BOFFFs: the big old fat female fish.

The danger is that current policies manage according to current biomass targets, ignoring fish size. The resulting population instability could, in theory, propagate systemically to the whole ecosystem—a domino effect eventually affecting fishermen too. This is especially true when trying to rebuild fish stocks. Which is the case with Atlantic swordfish. Industry pressures to resume fishing are based on the restoration of historic biomass levels, even though the swordfish are clearly undersized. The study results are published in the journal Nature.

Cindy Crawford Is Your Eco-Everywoman

Cindy Crawford—remember her? From the 1990s?—is back. But she's not modeling or acting: she's pimping PUR water in Vanity Fair's blog. This "working mom" is, she says, "changing world by changing her lifestyle. Think of me as your eco-everywoman." Fair enough. We should all try to unplug our appliances when not in use and recycle our plastic bottles.

Just a few paragraphs later, this "eco-everywoman" begins a rather heavy-handed, PR-ish thread about how she had an epiphany when she realized "I loved the taste of water after it had been through a PUR filter." Turns out Crawford is now designing a re-usable aluminum water bottle with PUR for a campaign called "Thirsty for Change." It launches next month, and Crawford wants us all to check in on her future blog posts and "wish me luck!" Once again, Vanity Fair's green coverage is heavy on the celebrities, light on the cause celebre.

Photo from VanityFair.com

April 15, 2008

Some Corals Survived A-Bombs, Others Didn't

Fifty years ago the last atomic bomb test shook the Pacific's Bikini Atoll. Now corals are flourishing here again—though with 42 fewer species than prior to the bomb blasts. At least 28 of the missing corals appear to be genuine local extinctions, victims of the 23 bombs exploded at Bikini between 1946 and 1958. An international team has been surveying biodiversity at the atoll, including diving into the 1954 Bravo Crater, site of the most powerful American atomic bomb ever exploded (15 megatons, 1,000 times bigger than Hiroshima). The Bravo bomb vaporized three islands, raised water temperatures to 100,00 degrees F, shook islands 125 miles away and left a crater 1.25 miles wide and 240 feet deep.

The 1946 point of view.

"The missing corals are fragile lagoonal specialists—slender branching or leafy forms that you only find in the sheltered waters of a lagoon," says Zoe Richards of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies and James Cook University. Bikini Atoll has been unpopulated and largely unvisited in the decades since the blasts, and reveals how in the absence of more modern stressors like overfishing and overpopulation some corals have the capacity to recover from vast upheavals. Because of its incredible history and current undisturbed character, Bikini Atoll is now the focus of an ongoing effort to list the northern Marshall Island atolls as a World Heritage Site.

Hope the US is spearheading and funding that effort. Seems the least we can do.