Cranberries Burst Into New Markets

  • Cranberry harvest in New Jersey (Photo by Keith Weller, courtesy of the USDA)

One thing we can be thankful for
this Thanksgiving is cranberry relish.
After a sour decade of collapsing prices,
the industry has rebounded with a record
season. Julie Grant reports:

Transcript

One thing we can be thankful for
this Thanksgiving is cranberry relish.
After a sour decade of collapsing prices,
the industry has rebounded with a record
season. Julie Grant reports:


In the late 1990s, the market for cranberries started drying up. Americans didn’t
seem to crave the pucker of our native berry. Some years growers were getting as
little as 8 dollars a barrel and they didn’t know if they could stay in business much
longer.

Today, they’re getting as much as 150 dollars per barrel.

Dawn Gates-Allen is fourth generation cranberry grower on Cape Cod.

“It’s been ten years of suppressed grower return for the price per barrel.”

Prices are rebounding because cranberries have gained popularity as a healthful
fruit overseas. Europe and Japan have started importing a third of America’s
cranberry crop.

But even with that new demand, you shouldn’t see a big jump in prices at the
supermarket this year: the weather has been great for cranberries and there’s a
bumper crop.

For The Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

Related Links

A Bog’s Goodbye

  • Greg Seymour, with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, walking through Cranberry Bog (Photo by Christina Morgan)

It’s normal to want to protect special
places in nature. But in some cases, these
places are disappearing simply because of nature.
Christina Morgan reports on an ancient spot that
might disappear in our lifetime. The people who
love it want to save it, but they might have to
let it go:

Transcript

It’s normal to want to protect special
places in nature. But in some cases, these
places are disappearing simply because of nature.
Christina Morgan reports on an ancient spot that
might disappear in our lifetime. The people who
love it want to save it, but they might have to
let it go:

For four generations, J-me Braig’s family has visited a rare
site, a bog left behind by glaciers thousands of years ago.

“As a child, I used to go out there and play on it, with my
grandmother, and we would pick cranberries; my brother and I would play on it. ”

Braig says her grandmother used to take a boat out to the bog
in a lake in Ohio. Her grandmother made pies and wine with
the cranberries.

Braig is a lake historian who’s worried about the bog. That’s
because it’s shrinking.

But before we talk about why it’s shrinking, though, it’s important
to know what makes this tiny area special.

Webster’s dictionary defines a bog as soft, waterlogged
ground. This bog, Cranberry Bog, is soft and waterlogged.
But it’s not ground. There’s no dirt. The bog is a 10 acre
patch of sphagnum moss.

Most bogs surround a glacial lake. Instead, Cranberry Bog is
surrounded by a lake, and floating. Here’s what happened.

Nearly 200 years ago, crews digging in an ancient river bed
created a reservoir to feed the Ohio and Erie canal. The
reservoir filled, the mossy bog floated to the surface. How or
why it stayed, no one knows.

“An absolute oddity. It shouldn’t be here.”

Greg Seymour is with the Ohio Department of Natural
Resources. He says the ancient bog is home to likely the only collection
of plants of its kind in the world.

More than 150 plants, a
handful native to Canada. Nudged southward by the glacier,
the plants are tricked by the cool bog mat into thinking they
never left home.

The bog is shrinking for several reasons. Waves from passing
boats loosen the bog mat. Storms topple trees
which rip out chunks of the mat. But Seymour says the biggest
threat is the bog’s chemistry, which makes the site its own
worst enemy.

“The number one factor is going to be the chemical reaction
between the alkaline lake waters and the acidic bog.”

The pH balance is off – way off. Cranberry Bog is doomed to disappear, probably within 30
years.

But area historian J-Me Braig remains upbeat, saying ever
since she can remember, someone has had a scheme to save
Cranberry Bog.

And sure enough, there is a new group determined to preserve the
ancient bog.

George O’Donnell leads Friends of Cranberry Bog. He and
others think one way to generate interest in the site, is to inventory of all that the bog has to offer.
Such an inventory is being done by the bog’s neighbor 8 miles
to the north, Dawes Arboretum.

Tim Mason is the manager of natural resources there. He says even
if the inventory and other efforts to preserve the bog fail, they
have a plan B. Dawes created a restoration area where pieces
of Cranberry Bog that break off are placed.

“We can just hold on to what’s there. It takes thousands of
years for the peat moss material to grow; so to create that is something we would certainly not see in
our life times.”

Saving the bog – or just preserving its pieces – are a long shot.
Yet the efforts persist. Historian J-Me Braig is one of many people
who hope for success. But even Braig admits, after more than
10,000 years, Cranberry Bog has had a pretty good run.

For The Environment Report, I’m Christina Morgan.

Related Links

Defending Rights of Nature

  • Sister Pat Siemen (pictured) leads a seminar on earth jurisprudence at Barry Law School in Orlando, Florida. (Photo by Jennifer Szweda Jordan)

Some lawyers believe it’s time to stand for the rights of nature. They want to represent trees. They want to defend the rights of birds and lakes, and all of nature.
They’re trying to put into practice a theory called earth jurisprudence.
Jennifer Szweda
Jordan has the story:

Transcript

Some lawyers believe it’s time to stand for the rights of nature. They
want to represent trees. They want to defend the rights of birds and
lakes, and all of nature. They’re trying to put into practice a theory
called earth jurisprudence. Jennifer Szweda Jordan has the story:


A law seminar on defending the rights of nature is probably not what
you expect, at least not at first. The start of Roman Catholic Sister
Pat Siemen’s law seminar on earth jurisprudence is unorthodox and Zen
like:


“We’re gonna start with our reflection time. And what I’d like you to
do is close your computers.”


Siemen taps a handheld chime in a classroom at Barry Law School in
Orlando, Florida. She has the law students practice slowing down so
they’ll notice what’s going on around them in nature, and they’ll take
the time to really think about arguing for the rights of nature in the
courtroom.


The legal system doesn’t recognize the rights of nature just yet.
Courts interpret the Constitution as protecting needs and rights of
humans. So only humans, or say, groups of humans such as corporations
can sue. The rights of bunnies and trees aren’t entitled to a voice in
courtrooms. Siemen says the emerging field of earth jurisprudence wants
to change that.


Part of the whole thought of earth jurisprudence is that other beings
actually be given their rights -legislatively – to come into court
through the understanding that someone as a guardian or trustee stands
in their right.


Besides teaching this new area of law, Siemen directs the Center for
Earth Jurisprudence. The center’s just wrapped up its first academic
year. Siemen’s early legal work focused on advocating for people who
were poor, minorities, or otherwise marginalized.


Siemen moved in a different direction when she was influenced by
ecotheologian Thomas Berry. Berry says that if the animals and trees
had a voice, they’d vote humans off the planet. Siemen was shocked:


“I had spent my whole life – at least adult life – ministerially trying
to stand in positions of empowerment of others, and furthering the
rights of others and I had never once really thought about what it
meant to be – whether it would be rivers or endangered species – what
it would mean to have to live and exist totally by the decisions of
humans.”


Siemen was also influenced by University of Southern California Law
School professor Christopher D. Stone. Stone wrote an article entitled
“Should Trees Have Standing?” In 1972, Supreme Court Justice William
Douglass agreed that inanimate objects should have rights. But that
view hasn’t gotten very far in American courtrooms.


The idea that ecosystems should have legal rights is problematic in the
view of free-market advocates. Sam Kazman is General Counsel for the
Competitive Enterprise Institute. He calls the theory of earth
jurisprudence gibberish.


“It is impossible to lay out what is in the best interest of an
ecosystem unless you lay out just what you as someone who owns that
ecosystem, or enjoys it, or appreciates it from a distance, what you
hold important.”


In other words, the owner will decide what’s best for the ecosystem.
Some legal experts believe giving nature rights would take nothing less
than a constitutional amendment.


University of Pittsburgh Law Professor Tom Buchele disagrees. He’s an
environmental lawyer who’s used the standing concept – unsuccessfully –
in arguing for a forest. He says that the Supreme Court could, if it
chose, interpret the constitution as allowing nature to have legal
standing:


“There’s certainly nothing in the constitution that says a case or
controversy has to have a person as the entity. It’s just that current
case law doesn’t do that.”


Buchele and Siemen know changes in court decisions are a long way away.
But if teaching about earth jurisprudence can make tomorrow’s corporate
counsels, real estate lawyers, and governmental officials consider the
trees and the water in their work, Siemen feels she’ll have made some
progress.


And getting law students to think about the rights of nature along with
the rights of humans might be the start of the legal revolution Siemen
wants to see.


For the Environment Report, this is Jennifer Szweda Jordan.

Related Links

Commentary – Forbidden Fruit?

Americans spend millions each year on corporate landscaping. But as Great
Lakes Radio Consortium commentator Tom Springer explains, what grows on
company property is usually forbidden fruit: