Environmental scientist Rachael Pierce and her team travel on airboats into the marshes around Lake Okeechobee. (Photo by Rebecca Williams)
Rachael Pierce has to shuffle her feet when she checks her snail traps... just to be sure she doesn’t surprise any alligators. (Photo by Rebecca Williams)
Pierce measuring an apple snail. (Photo by Rebecca Williams)
We’ve spent billions of dollars
just trying to partially restore
the Everglades in Florida. Now,
there’s a struggle to save a bird
there that’s close to extinction.
It’s a raptor called the snail kite.
It’s becoming one of the symbols
for saving the Everglades. Rebecca
Williams has more:
Transcript
We’ve spent billions of dollars
just trying to partially restore
the Everglades in Florida. Now,
there’s a struggle to save a bird
there that’s close to extinction.
It’s a raptor called the snail kite.
It’s becoming one of the symbols
for saving the Everglades. Rebecca
Williams has more:
The snail kite eats pretty much only one thing – a snail called the apple snail.
The apple snail’s been disappearing – partly because of people messing with water levels in the Everglades for farming and cities.
Scientist Rachael Pierce and her team have raised apple snails in the lab and let them go in a marsh at the edge of Lake Okeechobee. Now they need them to stick around and have babies.
“It’s unlikely the snail kites will come back here to this marsh because we haven’t released that many snails. But in the future when we scale this up we do hope to start seeing snail kites.”
The survival of the snail kite depends on this working. And, some people say, if the snail kite goes extinct, things won’t look good for the restoration of the Everglades.
Researchers with Project Kaisei are studying a swirling
vortex of trash that has
accumulated out in the Pacific Ocean. (Photo by Annie Crawley, courtesy of Project Kaisei)
A huge current rotates in the Pacific Ocean, causing floating plastic trash to gather in a giant vortex of garbage in the middle of the ocean – it’s become the world’s biggest dump. Project Kaisei has sent two ships to the area to study the problem. Doug Woodring is on the New Horizon. He talked with Lester Graham by satellite phone:
Transcript
A huge current rotates in the Pacific Ocean, causing floating plastic trash to gather in a giant vortex of garbage in the middle of the ocean – it’s become the world’s biggest dump. Project Kaisei has sent two ships to the area to study the problem. Doug Woodring is on the New Horizon. He talked with Lester Graham by satellite phone:
Lester Graham: You’re in the middle of the Pacific right now, looking for the Great Pacific Garbage patch. How much luck have you had in locating some of this plastic debris?
Doug Woodring: Unfortunately, too much luck. (laughs) It hasn’t been very difficult. In fact, I’m running into, ah, I can look out the window and see a big floating piece, right now, as we’re going by. But we’ve been, the last 5-6 days, we’ve been in it consistently. It’s not as many big pieces as the world might think, but it’s way many more small pieces than people know. And the reason is, with the UV dedrigation in the plastics, it get very brittle when it’s broken down by the sun, so after some time in the water, when the wave action, it’s very easy for everything to break down and sort of crack. So what we’re getting is what they call ‘confetti’, and it’s just literally in some places many, many pieces per square meter of this stuff. And we are really looking mostly at the surface, so it’s not known yet how deep this is either. So, there’s a lot of stuff out here.
Graham: Why’s this bad for the environment?
Woodring: When you get small pieces, you’ve got mistaken potential food source for animals. So, the marine life can be eating this. It is possible that it gets in the food chain. There are toxins, heavy metals, and persistent organic pollutants that attach themselves to plastics when they float. So, it’s not just a piece of plastic that a marine life eats, it’s a polluted piece of plastic. It’s also a little island, or a little flotation for species that can float around the ocean – and invasive species can go to different parts of the waters or land that wouldn’t have traveled that way otherwise. So, there’s a lot of implications that this science is only just now starting to help us figure out what’s going on.
Graham: Does anybody have any idea what we can do to reduce the impact of this huge garbage patch or to clean it up?
Woodring: Well, this is what we’re out here for. That’s the main part of our mission is to find solutions. And we can’t find solutions until we have some of the answers, and some of the data. So what we’re out here is with two vessels now, over a 30 day period, really looking for that data – water depth, leadings and temperatures and flows and salinity – to see how the plastics and the material, the debris might move around in the ocean. We will, later, be doing some analysis on the material, science of the plastics, to see if it’s recognizable by satellite. Because, obviously, without satellite imagery, it’s impossible to know exactly where the bigger masses are. You know, ‘how to clean it up,’ is going to be a very tricky thing, because the oceans are so big and these particles are not big. It’s all going to come back to what we’re doing on land, really, and the land policies for different ways to bring in better recycling and rebate programs to get a lot of the plastic that is out there today to be reused instead of simply thrown away, and so it doesn’t get into the rivers or the oceans in the first place.
Doug Woodring is a co-founder of Project Kaisei. He spoke with The Environment Report’s Lester Graham.
A company called ArborGen is working on altering Eucalyptus trees, so they can be turned into paper and biofuels more easily. (Photo courtesy of the National Biological Information Infastructure)
There’s already a lot of genetically
modified corn and soybeans out there.
Now, Mark Brush reports, one company
is working on genetically modifying
trees:
Transcript
There’s already a lot of genetically
modified corn and soybeans out there.
Now, Mark Brush reports, one company
is working on genetically modifying
trees:
The company is called ArborGen. And it’s working on altering Eucalyptus trees, so they can be turned into paper and biofuels more easily.
Eucalyptus is native to Australia and New Zealand.
But ArborGen has already got 330 acres of these genetically altered trees planted scattered across the South.
And now it wants the government to allow these trees to flower. And that has people like George Kimbrall worried.
He’s an attorney with the International Center for Technology Assessment. He says if they spread they’ll be bad for the environment.
“They’re water suckers. They don’t allow for much undergrowth. They’re poisonous to most animals. The leaves, the animals can’t eat them. Why would we want the south covered in Eucalyptus trees?”
When eucalyptus was brought over to California – it did become invasive. And there are some reports that it’s invasive in Florida too.
ArborGen says it’s altering these trees so they won’t spread in the wild.
The Mollicy Farms River Forest Levee (Keith Ouchley, Louisiana Nature Conservancy)
Man made levees line the banks
of the Mississippi River and its
tributaries. They protect towns
and they allow farmers to plow
the bottomlands. But levees come
at a price: habitat destruction
and worse flooding downstream.
Now, more people are calling for
taking down levees and returning
floodplain areas to their natural
state. Samara Freemark
reports from Louisiana – the end
of the line for the water that
drains from the middle of the nation:
Transcript
Man made levees line the banks
of the Mississippi River and its
tributaries. They protect towns
and they allow farmers to plow
the bottomlands. But levees come
at a price: habitat destruction
and worse flooding downstream.
Now, more people are calling for
taking down levees and returning
floodplain areas to their natural
state. Samara Freemark
reports from Louisiana – the end
of the line for the water that
drains from the middle of the nation:
The Mollicy Farms site in Northern LA provides a striking example of just how dramatically a levee can remake a landscape.
“Here comes the river down through here.”
Keith Ouchley is with the Nature Conservancy, and he’s showing me an aerial photo of Mollicy Farms. The site is split in half by a river. On the west side, there’s 30000 acres of primeval forest. On the east side, a swath of cleared land.
“Once, it was forest in the lower area of tupelo and in the upper areas of sweet gum. And every year the river would overflow and flood the forest.”
In the late 1960s, soybean farmers cleared the area built levees to hold back the annual floods – giant earthen walls, 150 ft wide at the base and 30 feet tall. Ouchley grew up in the area. He remembers the first time he saw the site after the clearing.
“I thought at the time you could almost see the curvature of the earth, looking across this massive clearing up there.”
Levees protect a lot of land for farming. But some people are starting to wonder if they’re worth the cost – not just the money it takes to build and maintain them, but the damage they do to ecosystems.
Denise Reed is a geologist at the University of New Orleans. She says hundreds of species depend on floodplain habitats- and without flooding, those habitats vanish.
“The river is the lifeblood of floodplain and delta ecosystems. When you build levees and you cut it off, we cut off those habitats from the river. And essentially they just degrade and die. Putting it back would definitely be a good thing.”
Levees might also raise the chances of truly catastrophic flooding downstream. Whenever there’s a lot of water in the river – say, there’s heavy rain upstream – that water shoots straight down the channel with enormous force. And it sometimes breaks through downstream levees that protect homes.
If you take down levees upstream some of that water has somewhere else to go – out into the forest or wetlands, where it spreads out across thousands of acres.
All of which is why Denise Reed says, instead of building more levees, it might be a good idea to take some down.
“Just because we’ve had levees on the river for the last hundred years or so doesn’t mean to say we’re always going to have levees on the river. The challenge for us is letting nature do its thing while still allowing us to navigate on the river and bring ships in, and that kind of things, and for us to live places where we’re not going to be flooded out. We can do that.”
After catastrophic flooding in 1993, the federal government started buying up levee-protected land along the Mississippi and its tributaries with an eye towards restoring floodplains. But the memory of that flood faded and funding for the program fell off.
That left private groups like the Nature Conservancy to take up the effort.
This summer they’ll punch holes in the levee at Mollicy Farms. As the water rises in the spring, it will gradually seep out onto the landscape, restoring the floodplain.
“50 years, 100 years, you’ll be able to take a boat out through nice, mature, bottomland hardwood floodplain forest. You know, see water moccasins and catch bluegill brims and alligators floating on logs and that kind of thing.”
Ouchley says he’d like to see the program replicated in floodplains all over the country.
More than half of the mercury switches still on the road are in GM’s cars. But, since filing for bankruptcy, GM stopped paying into the program. (Photo courtesy of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory)
The new General Motors, which recently emerged from bankruptcy, wants to create a clean, green image with its Chevy Volt electric car. But GM might have a bit of an environmental PR problem on its hands. Tamara Keith explains:
Transcript
The new General Motors, which recently emerged from bankruptcy, wants to create a clean, green image with its Chevy Volt electric car. But GM might have a bit of an environmental PR problem on its hands. Tamara Keith explains:
Automakers used to use mercury switches for lights and anti-lock brakes. But when old cars are scrapped and melted down, those parts turn into toxic air pollution.
So automakers and environmental groups created a program to recycle the mercury.
More than half of the mercury switches still on the road are in GM’s cars. But, since filing for bankruptcy, GM stopped paying into the program.
Rich Bell is president of the program, and he also works at Ford.
“None of our members are interested in paying for GM’s environmental legacy issues, and so we’re looking for a path forward, and we’re kind of in the midst of that now.”
In a statement, the new GM said those cars with mercury switches were made by the old GM.
The new GM that emerged from bankruptcy is not responsible for those old switches.
Matthew Grocoff says a whole house fan gives the same comfort as you would have with an air conditioning system.
(Photo courtesy of Greenovation TV)
Energy efficiency is on the mind
of a lot of homeowners. They’re
starting to question everything
about their homes, even the need
for air conditioning. Lester
Graham met with some homeowners
and an energy-efficiency expert
to talk about a different approach
to cooling a house:
Transcript
Energy efficiency is on the mind
of a lot of homeowners. They’re
starting to question everything
about their homes, even the need
for air conditioning. Lester
Graham met with some homeowners
and an energy-efficiency expert
to talk about a different approach
to cooling a house:
For some people, air-conditioning just feels a little unnatural. I mean, it’s a refrigerated room, right?
There are older ways of cooling a house that are cheaper and use a lot less electricity.
Matthew Grocoff is with Greenovation TV. His website suggests all kinds of ways to make homes more green.
We met at a house in a tree-lined neighborhood of century-old homes in Ann Arbor, Michigan.
(sounds of house and stairs)
He wanted to show me an idea that’s like throwing open the windows and pulling in a cool summer breeze.
It’s called a whole house fan.
Grocoff: “We’re at the home of Jacinta Beehner and Thore Bergman. Thore actually installed this fan himself. It cost about $250 – about $9500 less than the quote that they got to install an air conditioning system in their house. And, this summer, they have not had to turn on their window units at all.”
Now Thore is not a carpenter. He’s a university researcher who studies monkey vocalizations. But, he decided he’d try to install the big fan in his ceiling on his own.
Bergman: “It was fairly easy. It took a couple hours. The tricky thing was – we have an older house that had layers of plaster and wood in the ceiling. So, cutting through that to make the hole took a little more work that it might in some houses. But it wasn’t too bad.”
Beehner: “I have to admit, I didn’t really believe that maybe he could install it himself. And yet, he did a great job. And I am the biggest fan of the whole house fan.”
Grocoff: “So, you’ve got the Beehner-Bergman fan club here. And this is interesting, because the goal, for most homeowners, is to get the house to a comfortable 72 degree temperature. And, it’s kind of strange that when it’s 65 degrees outside, and it’s 80 degrees inside your house, that we’re turning on an air conditioning unit when the air outside is actually colder than the air conditioning unit.”
(sound of fan turning on)
Bergman: “One drawback is the noise. Which, we’ve gotten used to. We kind of like it for sleeping – it blocks some of the street noise. We’re standing right underneath it, and it’s kind of hard to talk.”
Beehner: “But, we also have a baby. So the whole house fan serves as white noise, which really helps us move around upstairs while he’s asleep.”
Grocoff: “Those people who are not looking for that white noise sound, like Jacinta and Thore are for their baby, they’re going to be able to get something that’s quieter, more efficient, more insulated, that’s going to be virtually silent, at the higher price points.”
There have been some surprises along the way.
Jacinta says, you have to keep in mind – anything in the night air will be drawn into the house.
Beehner: “One night, we actually did turn it on, and within about one minute, our entire house was filled with the smell of skunk.
Grocoff: “So, if you’ve got really good, deep skunk smell, you know the fan is working. Another possible drawback is, with the air, you’re bringing in any kind of dust, pollen, anything else like that.”
But, Grocoff says, overall, this big sorta-box fan in the ceiling really pulls the hot air out of the house and pulls the cool air from outdoors into the house.
Now, these fans don’t work everywhere.
If you live in an extremely humid area, or a region where it never really cools down at night or in the morning, it might not be a good fit.
But for areas that enjoy cooler mornings and evenings in the summer, Grocoff says this is a good alternative.
Grocoff: “With a whole house attic fan, you’re going to get the same comfort as you would with an air conditioning system. But, on a dollar-for-dollar basis, the cost for running an air conditioning system is 20 cents to 30 cents every hour that you have that turned on. For a whole house attic fan, you’re talking about a penny to a nickel an hour.”
There are all kinds of designs besides the big box fan types.
You can go to a home improvement store, your heating and cooling installer, or do some research online at greenovation.TV or just type in whole house fan in Google. You’ll find plenty of places wanting to sell you there version of a newly popular old idea.
The Energy Information Administration says power bills could also fluctuate based on whether we develop cheap low-carbon coal technology. (Photo source: Frank C. Muller at Wikimedia Commons)
The price we pay for power in the
future will depend on the kind of
power plants we invest in. That’s
according to a report that examines
proposed climate change regulations.
Shawn Allee has more:
Transcript
The price we pay for power in the
future will depend on the kind of
power plants we invest in. That’s
according to a report that examines
proposed climate change regulations.
Shawn Allee has more:
The Energy Information Administration is the federal government’s crystal ball when it comes to energy policy.
The EIA looked at the House version of a big climate change bill. The Senate takes it up next month.
Forecast director John Conti says new regulations could cost each household between $12 and $227 more each year within a decade.
Conti says there’s a range because it’s not exactly clear how much it’ll cost to switch to low-carbon power sources, like nuclear.
“For most technologies, you have a good idea of how much they’re going to cost. Of course, we haven’t built a nuclear plant in twenty or so years and, as a result, there’re varying cost estimates and people can debate, I think, for a large extent, until that first plant is indeed built.”
Conti says power bills could also fluctuate based on whether we develop cheap low-carbon coal technology.
Until recently, there hasn’t been an order for a new nuclear plant in 30 years.
(Photo courtesy of the National Renewable Energy Laboratory)
Some Senate Republicans want the climate
change bill to focus on building new nuclear
power plants. They’re calling for as many as
100 new plants in 20 years. But the industry
has been in decline for so many years now,
there’s concern there might not be enough
nuclear engineers to do the job. Julie Grant
reports:
Transcript
Some Senate Republicans want the climate
change bill to focus on building new nuclear
power plants. They’re calling for as many as
100 new plants in 20 years. But the industry
has been in decline for so many years now,
there’s concern there might not be enough
nuclear engineers to do the job. Julie Grant
reports:
There’s a lot of new interest in nuclear energy and technology these days. But there’s a problem.
The American Nuclear Society estimates they need 700 new nuclear engineers per year to keep up with growing the demand. It’s enough to give long-time nuclear supporters whip-lash. Until recently, things looked gloomy for the nuclear industry.
William Martin is chair of the nuclear engineering department at the University of Michigan. Ten years ago, he says no new plants were being designed or built. And he was having a tough time finding students.
“A student entering the field, what you could tell them was, ‘well, there’s a big focus on waste.’ That’s not hardly something that excites young students to enter the field.”
Martin remembers standing on the stage at graduation in the mid 1990s to call the names of his graduates. Other engineering departments had so many students, it took an hour to call them all. But Martin only had a few names to call.
“Our students trip across in about ten seconds.”
Lots of nuclear engineering programs didn’t make it through the down times. There are less than half the university programs today than there were 30 years ago.
Nuclear got a bad name starting in 1979 – with the meltdown at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. That was followed by the deadly nuclear accident at Chernobyl, Ukraine in the ‘80s.
By the early 1990s, President Clinton announced he would eliminate funding for nuclear power research and development.
Until recently, there hasn’t been an order for a new nuclear plant in 30 years.
Vaughn Gilbert is spokesman for Westinghouse Electric Company, which focuses on nuclear energy.
He says Westinghouse laid off a lot its engineers in the down years. A decade ago, those who were left were heading toward retirement. So, Gilbert says, the company started working with universities to train engineering students to run its aging nuclear plants.
“Simply because we knew we would need to attract new people to maintain the existing fleet and then also to work with our customers to decommission the plants as they came offline.”
Westinghouse and other nuclear companies started giving lots of money to maintain university programs.
And then, everyone started worrying about climate change – and looking for ways to make energy that wouldn’t create more greenhouse gases. Nuclear power has started making a comeback.
Gilbert says new plants are in the works again – and Westinghouse needs engineers. The company’s designs will be used in six new U.S. plants.
The timing is pretty good for 25 year old Nick Touran. He’s a PhD student in nuclear engineering at the University of Michigan. He knows there’s a negative stigma to nuclear power – because he’s asked people about it.
“I just say, ‘so what do you think about nuclear power?’ Just to passersby on the street. And one person said, ‘I only think one thing – no, no, no, no, no.’”
But Touran says the negative stuff mostly comes from older people. When Three Mile Island melted-down, Touran wasn’t even born yet. He says most people his age are much more accepting of nuclear power.
“It’s the people who remember Three Mile Island and remember Chernobyl and remember World War II, who have all these very negative associations with nuclear weapons and Soviet reactors that were built incredibly wrong. And stuff like that.”
Touran says much of his generation just sees a power source that doesn’t create greenhouse gases.
Of course, there are greenhouse gases created in the process of manufacturing nuclear fuel rods. And then there’s that pesky problem of that spent nuclear waste. There’s still no permanent place to dump it.
Touran says he started studying nuclear power because he was amazed by it. But as the number of students in his department grows, he says more are choosing nuclear because it’s a smart career choice.
Several universities are testing out the new Kindle DX, hoping to save money and paper on printing (Photo source: K.lee at Wikimedia Commons)
This fall, six colleges and
universities are throwing out
a lot of their textbooks. Rebecca
Williams reports they’re testing
out the idea of students using
electronic readers for some
classes instead of textbooks:
Transcript
This fall, six colleges and universities are throwing out a lot of their textbooks. Rebecca Williams reports they’re testing out the idea of students using electronic readers for some classes instead of textbooks:
The schools are Case Western, Arizona State, Reed College, Pace University, The University of Virginia’s business school and Princeton.
They’re all testing out the new Kindle DX – it’s got a large screen that the text of textbooks will be loaded into.
Cass Cliatt is with Princeton. She says the University prints out 50 million sheets of paper a year – even though a lot of course material is online these days.
“So the irony is that the availability of digitized text has lead to an actual increase in printing because people don’t like to read a lot of text on computer screens.”
But she says these are different. The new Kindles let you highlight stuff and take notes the way you might in an actual textbook. So in theory, students won’t need to print.
Cliatt says they’ll be testing that theory to see if universities can save paper and money on printing.
Some Hip Hop artists are using their music to reach people about environmental issues affecting their communities (Photo source: Lestat at Wikimedia Commons)
When many people think of songs about the environment, they conjure up visions of folk singers and acoustic guitars. But the environment is becoming a more prevalent issue among Hip-Hop artists. Lester Graham reports they’re looking at the issue and how it affects their lives directly:
Transcript
When many people think of songs about the environment, they conjure up visions of folk singers and acoustic guitars. But the environment is becoming a more prevalent issue among Hip-Hop artists. Lester Graham reports they’re looking at the issue and how it affects their lives directly:
Environmentalists are often portrayed as treehugging elitists by conservative talk show hosts – and others.
That image really was never accurate, but the environmental movement is becoming more diverse. The environmental issues are becoming increasingly important to a wider swath of society.
Mike Cermack is a consultant for Boston’s public schools. He helps teachers figure out the best ways to teach classes such as environmental science.
He’s come to the conclusion that music can go a long way in getting the attention of kids in the classroom – especially since Hip-Hop artists started tackling the environment and not just as some distant ‘polar bears and butterflies’ issue.
“We really want to start at the corner store and ask deep questions like, ‘why isn’t there any fresh produce? Is that linked to the fact that diabetes and obesity is kind of rampant in our neighborhoods and in our families?’”
As people living in inner cities Cermack says – artists such as Mos Def did it in his song ‘New World Water.’
(clip of Mos Def song)
And it’s not just those big nationally known artists.
Mike Cermack says he stumbled into Boston’s local ‘green Hip-Hop’ movement by working with activists who were trying to stop a power plant from being built next to an elementary school.
“In talking with them further and getting to know them, also many of them turned out to be these really talented MCs, these talented lyricists who are using the new knowledge that they found working with the non-profits and kind of weaving those into their more traditional narratives of ‘this is what’s wrong with street/urban issues; this is what’s wrong with all the gangsters around/in my city.’ They’re saying how can we also bring in these environmental issues.”
And those artists are pulling in friends and bringing a whole lot of street cred to environmental issues.
Tem Blessed and Ben Gilbarg called in some of their Boston friends to perform ‘Green Anthem.’
(clip of ‘Green Anthem’)
“They’re staying true to their roots as kind of the voice social injustice and speaking out against urban problems and they’re really mixing it up with a lot of environmental issues.”
Mike Cermack says he’s been working to get students interested in environmental issues in the classroom, but Hip-Hop artists such as J-Live and Thes One get it done in a way the students know.
“They’re already used to loving the hip-hop tracks. And they know the MC. You know, it’s more important that the MC is from the community. That’s another big piece. I think it’s a really interesting start to this green hip-hop potential.”
Environmental scientist Rachael Pierce and her team travel on airboats into the marshes around Lake Okeechobee. (Photo by Rebecca Williams)
