U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service catch an Asian carp. This invasive species can grow up to four feet long, and the U.S. House and Senate have agreed to supply funds to try to keep them out of the Great Lakes. (Photo courtesy of U.S. Fish and Wildife Service)
The U.S. House and Senate recently passed a bill that will help keep Asian carp out of the Great Lakes. As the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Celeste Headlee reports, the federal government will contribute nearly two and a half million dollars to help repel the fish:
Transcript
The U.S. House and Senate recently passed a bill that will help keep Asian carp out of the Great Lakes. As the Great Lakes Radio Consortium Celeste Headlee reports, the federal government will contribute nearly two and a half million dollars to help repel the fish:
Asian carp are huge, often growing to be four feet long and weighing 80 pounds. They are also extremely prolific and voracious. Most Asian carp consume up to 40 percent of their body weight every day. There is currently an electric fish barrier strung across the bottom of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal to keep the fish out of the Great Lakes. The barrier creates an underwater field of electricity that repels the carp.
Andy Buchsbaum is the director of the National Wildlife Federation’s Great Lakes Office. He says the current barrier is temporary and due to fail next year.
“Today the Great Lakes really dodged a bullet. Right now, the carp are poised 20 miles away from the failing barrier, which is just downstream from Lake Michigan. And if that barrier fails, then essentially the Great Lakes as we know them are over.”
The U.S. House and Senate passed a bill that will supply 75 percent of the funds for building a new barrier. The Great Lakes governors have agreed to supply the rest of the money. President Bush has said he will sign the bill when it reaches his desk. Buchsbaum says the new barrier can be completed within 60 to 90 days.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Celeste Headlee.
Governments are trying to figure out the best way to deal with urban sprawl. Legislators and planners are considering all kinds of approaches to manage the growth of cities, but some say government really has no business trying to stop the market forces that are driving the rapid growth. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports on the deeper debate between property rights and land use protection:
Transcript
Governments are trying to figure out the best way to deal with urban sprawl. Legislators and
planners are considering all kinds of approaches to manage the growth of cities. But, some say
government really has no business trying to stop the market forces that are driving the rapid
growth. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports on the deeper debate
between property rights and land use protection:
Through the public process, states that are grappling with urban sprawl end up hearing from everyone involved. While the media and environmental groups tend to look at the
problems of congestion and loss of green space and farmland due to the rapid growth at the edges
of cities, others see the growth as driven by what people want – it’s natural growth, even organic. In
fact, many property owners, builders and developers, see government interference as “un-
American,” as testimony from this public hearing in Michigan shows.
“As an American, I strongly believe in our citizens’ rights to pursue life, liberty and property.”
“Centralized planning did not work in Russia, Cuba, North Korea or anywhere else they’ve
attempted it.” “Are we gonna mandate where they’re going to live? Is this gonna be America?”
“The land should be controlled by the individual who has paid for the land and pays the taxes on the land and should be able to do with that property what he wants to do.” “Our Constitution tells
us about the preservation of private property rights.”
There’s something deeply rooted in the American cultural ethic that bonds people to the land – or
more precisely – to their land. It might be leftovers of the concept of Manifest Destiny where,
in the words of one essayist, land ownership was associated with wealth and tied to self-
sufficiency, political power, and independent “self-rule.” This seems to be especially true of
people who live in rural areas, or are only a generation or two removed from the farm.
Amy Liu is with the think-tank, the ‘Brookings Institution.’ She says when states start looking at
growth management techniques, commonly called “Smart Growth,” landowners and builders
become suspicious.
“There is a belief that the government needs to get out of the way of the market. And so the idea
of having government intervene in the real estate market and consumer choice is considered un-
American.”
And property rights advocates quickly become dogmatic about their beliefs and resist any kind of
restrictions on use of land.
In the same way, some environmentalists consider sprawl to merely be a matter of greedy
developers and builders wanting to make money no matter what the cost to the environment,
green space, or farmland. They sometimes ignore the fact that consumer demand for larger lots
and larger houses, as well as convenient shopping, is much of the driving force behind urban
sprawl.
Liu says many on each side of the urban sprawl debate are inflexible.
“You know, I think that there are definitely reasons why the environmentalists can be extreme
and why the property rights advocates can be extreme.”
And generally, the two sides are talking right past each other.
Ann Woiwode is with the environmental group, the Sierra Club. She says the opponents of
“Smart Growth” say they don’t want government interference, but she says they don’t talk that
way when they’re in need of roads, fire protection, good schools, and other government services.
Woiwode says “Smart Growth” doesn’t mean unreasonable restrictions.
“I’m not trying to take anybody’s rights away and I don’t think that’s the appropriate approach.
What in any society part of being a society is that we collectively decide how we’re going to
make decisions that affect the entirety of the community.”
And while Woiwode and other environmentalists are in favor of making sure green space is
preserved, most of them acknowledge that growth is inevitable. They say they just want to make
sure it’s the right kind of growth.
Amy Liu at the Brookings Institution says not every growth management plan makes sense.
Some of them only look at benefiting the environment and ignore market forces, the desire that
many people have for a bit of land and a home to call their own.
“There are certainly growth management policies that don’t work, that strictly limit development-
growth boundaries and are therefore anti-growth. I think the growth management policies, the
Smart Growth policies that do work are those that really do try to anticipate and accommodate
growth in a metropolitan area in a way that is going to promote economic development, that is
fiscally sustainable, that is environmentally sustainable, and that actually allows low-income
working families and middle-class and upper-income families to enjoy that growth.”
And finding that balance in a world where politics and competing interests sometimes muddy the
best intentions will be the real trick, as states try to define what “Smart Growth” will mean for
people pursuing the American dream of owning their own home.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.
A Canadian firm is gearing up to produce a cloth–like solar panel that will cost less than current technologies. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
Transcript
A Canadian firm is gearing up to produce a cloth–like solar panel that will cost less than current
technologies. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Lester Graham reports:
This is a photo-voltaic solar panel, but instead of being a sheet of silicon on glass, it’s tiny beads
of silicon between layers of aluminum foil and sealed in a plastic sheeting. It’s strong, light
weight, and flexible.
Ron Jutras is a company officer with Spheral Solar in Cambridge, Ontario:
“The primary difference between this particular solar panel and others that people are used to seeing
maybe on highway signs or potentially on buildings, is the fact that it is a pliable system, meaning
that it can be bent and wrapped around products.”
So the solar panels can be put on facades of buildings or draped over a roof. It also will come
in different colors, giving architects some flexibility. Because it uses much less silicon than
current technology, the price is expected to be quite a bit lower. The first commercial shipments of
the flexible solar panels are expected next year.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, this is Lester Graham.
To the environmentalist, “green” refers to something environmentally friendly. When manufacturers refer to green, they usually mean money. But with an increase in the demand for environmentally sound buildings, manufacturers have the opportunity to combine the two definitions. For those who see the possibility, retooling to meet the demand for green construction could mean a large payoff in a burgeoning industry. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Shula Neuman reports:
Transcript
To the environmentalist, “green” refers to something environmentally friendly. When
manufacturers refer to green, they usually mean money. But with an increase in the demand for
environmentally sound buildings, manufacturers have the opportunity to combine the two
definitions. For those who see the possibility, retooling to meet the demand for green
construction could mean a large payoff in a burgeoning industry. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Shula Neuman filed this report:
There’s an 86-year old abandoned building in a Cleveland neighborhood that was left for dead a
few decades ago. It’s a shame because inside the building are 26-foot high ceilings with ornate
molding, original Tennessee marble walls and wood trim. But recently, the building, which was
once the Cleveland Trust Bank, was identified by a coalition of local environmental groups as the
ideal spot for their offices. The Cleveland Green Building Coalition spearheaded the task of
converting the old bank building into the new Environmental Center. Executive director Sadhu
Johnston explains, the project is not your average renovation.
“What we’re really trying to do is to demonstrate to people that you can do green while
preserving and that’s often they are seen to butt heads and this project is showing that the two
movements have a lot in common.”
While touring the mostly finished building, Johnston points out seemingly endless
environmentally friendly features. First, there’s a radiant floor heating and cooling system. Then
there are the geothermal wells under the parking lot. They use insulation made from recycled
paper and cardboard. And the roof is divided into three sections: one part has traditional black
tar, another has a white reflective coating and the third segment is a living roof, which looks like
a garden.
Johnston says the layout is meant to demonstrate a more than 100-degree temperature variation
between the three surfaces. All of the different materials and methods used to construct the
Environmental Center, could signal a forward thinking manufacturer to see financial reward from
the burgeoning interest in green buildings. After all, green buildings tend to save money.
The Environmental Center is 67-percent more energy efficient than required by code. In fiscal
terms, that adds up to a half-million dollar savings over 20 years. This might make you wonder
why more people aren’t building green. Actually, according to U.S. Green Building Council
president and CEO Christine Ervin, interest in green construction has been increasing over the
past decade. Since the group established green certification standards three years ago, nearly 700
projects have registered to meet certification. And, Ervin adds, the increase in interest is not
exclusive to tree-huggers
“The diversity of the kinds of projects also is telling us that this is a serious trend that is moving
into the mainstream market. We have projects that are registered firehouses, small schools, FAA
stations. All the way up to manufacturing plants and convention centers.”
Several cities and government agencies are already mandating green construction on new
buildings, including the city of Portland, the General Services Administration and the U.S. Army.
David Goldstein is with the Natural Resources Defense Council and environmental group in San
Francisco. He says there’s a movement afoot to establish national incentives to build green. In
other words, the time is ripe for the construction industry to get with the green program.
“From the point of view of the manufacturers of the equipment and supplies, and of the expert
building designers who put all these things together, once these policies for green buildings are
there, that’s a new market opportunity for them. So it is in their interest to promote these kinds of
policies.”
Goldstein adds green regulations also have a coincidental social benefit. With 35-percent of
pollution coming from the electricity and gas buildings use, requiring green buildings is as much
a public health issue as it is an economic one.
Some manufacturers in the great lakes region have caught on to the possibilities. The Cleveland
Based Garland Company manufactures and installs roofing systems all over the country and is
responsible for the Environmental Center’s roof—its first in-town green job. Garland
incorporates recycled materials into about 80 percent of its products. Nathan Schaus, project
manager at Garland, says about 15 percent of their business comes from their green product line.
Schaus says the market for green materials will continue to grow, especially with manufacturers
pushing its benefits.
“It’s a two-fold education. You need to educate the buyer, the end user that what they’re buying
is a building solution for the long term. So the initial investment, you have to explain that cost
over its life cycle. With the incentives, it’s changing the mindsets of the people that regulate
government and electricity today.”
Government regulators may work even faster on establishing incentives when they see the
increase in demand for residential green building on top of the commercial market. According to
the National Association of Homebuilders, about 13,000 green homes were built last year – a
huge increase over any single year before that. If demand continues to increase at such a rapid
pace, those business that go green now may be making plenty of green in the future.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Shula Neuman.
From a distance a cordwood building looks deceptively like it’s made
of
stone. But if you take a closer look you’ll see that what you thought
were stones actually are the ends of short logs laid widthwise to form
a
wall. In Europe, cordwood homes, sometimes called "poor mans’
architecture", have existed for over a thousand years. In North
America
the technique arrived with the early pioneers. Today, in the United
States, cordwood masonry is experiencing a renewed interest as
affordable housing because it’s cheap, easy to build, and energy
efficient. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Linda Anderson has more:
Transcript
On the far end of a pond, in upstate New York, a group of people are working away, busy as
beavers. The comparison works nicely here, because like beavers, these people are building with
logs and a mud-like mortar.
To one side, a group of men vigorously mix mortar in a wheelbarrow. When they get it just right,
it’s delivered to another group of people whoa re busy stacking 6-8 pound logs. Carefully and
methodically, men, women, and children take the mortar and slather it around each sixteen inch
log. It looks like they’re stacking a wall of firewood. Only this wall is designed to last more
than one season. It’s designed to last a lifetime.
Rob Roy has been building with cordwood for over twenty years. He says there are areas in northern
Greece and Siberia where one-thousand-year-old cordwood structures still stand. Roy and his wife
Jaki discovered cordwood masonry during the energy crisis in the 1970’s.
“My wife and I just needed low cost shelter. This was back in 1975. We had worked on a log
building of heavy pine logs in Arkansas, and we found we just couldn’t heft these large logs by
ourselves. About that time there was an article in National Geographic that showed two pictures,
one interior and one exterior, of a cordwood wall… and we said jeez that makes sense. We can do
that. You are not handling anything more than a six to eight pound log end.”
No literature was available, so Roy and Jaki did their own research. They build their house,
learned from their mistakes, and wrote a book about it: The Complete Book of Cordwood Masonry
Housebuilding. Now they teach workshops at their home near Plattsburgh, New York and speak at
conferences. They’ve become missionaries of cordwood masonry.
“Cordwood makes use of waste wood which is unsuitable for other building uses. Logs which, for
example, are not strait enough to take to the saw mill. perhaps dead wood that has been fire
killed or disease killed on your property. I have even heard of people using driftwood or peeler
cores left over from plywood plants. All sorts of sources of so-called junk wood is perfectly fine
when you cut it into sixteen inch pieces.”
Roy says depending on how resourceful you are, materials can cost between ten to twenty dollars
per square foot. Roughly half of the cost of a standard frame building. Roy says a properly made
cordwood home will be energy efficient. It’s easy to heat in the winter and stays cool in the
summer.
“It has this wonderful combination of insulation and thermal mass. The mortar joint between the
log ends does not pass through the wall. There is insulated space. That space can be filled with
loose insulation such as vermiculite or pearlite. We use sawdust treated with lime. It’s equal to
about R3 insulation value per inch of thickness, roughly the same as fiberglass.”
Not only is cordwood masonry easy on the environment, Roy says it’s easy on people as well.
Light-weight logs allow an ease of construction that invites everyone to participate, including
Grandma. Although it’s probably unlikely you’ve ever seen one, Rob Roy says cordwood construction
is on the rise. Today there are three times as many cordwood homes in the United States as there
were a decade ago. Most can be found in Wisconsin and New York.
Eight years ago, in Cambridge, New York, Scott Carrino built a cordwood home with his family. Like
many cordwood homes, his is round. Colored glass bottles have been placed in patterns in the
walls. When the sun shines, it looks like stained glass. Carrino became interested in cordwood
masonry after reading Rob Roy’s book.
“I had actually visited Rob Roy pretty quickly after seeing this book, and saw some of his
buildings and really connected with it, and just fell in love with this building technique.”
TO keep his costs down, Carrino used lots of recycled materials, scavenging old windows, tubs and
sinks. He says many people look at his house and think it was an enormous amount of work. But his
friend, Jon Carlson, says that’s relative.
“It is a lot of work, but all building of homes is a lot of work. When you lay up a cordwood wall
its finished. Don’t have to come back and paint it. Don’t have to come back and side it. So not
only are you finished, but also you are creating something that is pretty maintenance-free.”
Cordwood builders, like Carlson and Carrino, love living in a home made of strong, natural
materials built by their own hands. Rob Roy says with the right materials and friends, anyone can
have that experience. And just like beavers, they’ll be experts in no time.
For the Great Lakes Radio Consortium, I’m Linda Anderson in Cambridge, New York.
University of Buffalo researchers have developed a new technology that
could save taxpayers money on highway repair and weigh station expenses
it’s called "smart concrete." The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Elizabeth Christensen reports:
It’s no longer that unusual for builders to incorporate elements of
“green” design into their projects. Often, the buildings are new
construction. But it’s much more challenging to renovate an existing
structure. Now, some colleges and universities are leading the movement
toward green renovation. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Wendy
Nelson reports:
Big homes on big lawns on long winding roads. That’s how many
residential subdivisions have been designed for decades. Now, some
people are trying to change these traditional methods and make
development less damaging to the environment. The Great Lakes Radio
Consortium’s Todd Witter visits one site:
Jet skis have quickly grown in popularity. But paddling a canoe isstill a favorite with many outdoors enthusiats. While there are severalmodern materials canoes are made of, there’s one man who prefers morenatural canoes. And he prefers to build them himself. The Great LakesRadio Consortium’s Todd Witter has the story:
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service catch an Asian carp. This invasive species can grow up to four feet long, and the U.S. House and Senate have agreed to supply funds to try to keep them out of the Great Lakes. (Photo courtesy of U.S. Fish and Wildife Service)