Asian Carp Update

  • Charter boat captain Eric Stuecher says Asian Carp will likely ruin his business. (Photo by Jennifer Guerra)

A big monster of a fish is at
the center of a US Supreme Court
case. Asian Carp are making their
way up the Mississippi towards the
Great Lakes. Michigan’s Attorney
General filed a lawsuit asking the
Court to close a Chicago canal in
order to keep the carp out. The
shipping industry says, ‘no can do.’
Jennifer Guerra has
a closer look at what’s at stake:

Transcript

A big monster of a fish is at
the center of a US Supreme Court
case. Asian Carp are making their
way up the Mississippi towards the
Great Lakes. Michigan’s Attorney
General filed a lawsuit asking the
Court to close a Chicago canal in
order to keep the carp out. The
shipping industry says, ‘no can do.’
Jennifer Guerra has
a closer look at what’s at stake:

There’s one way to look at this as a purely economic story. In one corner you’ve got the people who ship cargo by water.

“Lynne Munch, senior vice president regional advocacy of the American Waterways Operators.”

She says, if the Illinois is forced to close two of the locks in the Chicago canal permanently, more than 17 million tons of cargo will have to be shipped by truck instead of barge, and hundreds of jobs will be lost.

“One company alone has reported that they will lose 93 jobs next year if the locks are closed. One of our towing companies estimates they’ll lose more than 130 jobs if the locks are closed.”

In the other corner, you’ve got the seven billion dollar tourism and fishing industries.

“Oh hi, I’m Eric Stuecher, I own a company called Great Lakes Fishing Charters.”

Stuecher takes people out on the Great Lakes and in rivers across Michigan. Salmon, Trout, Perch, you name it, he’ll help you fish it. But if the invasive Asian Carp get into the Great Lakes?

“It would probably cost me the business. They’ll eat anything they can get in their mouths, to the demise of so many of our other game fish.”

So that’s the economic side of the story. But what if we told you there’s more at stake here than dollars and cents.

“In terms of environmental impact, the Asian carp have the potential to seriously disrupt the Great Lakes ecosystem.”

That’s Marc Gaden with the Great Lakes Fisheries Commission. He says there are already a lot of pests in the Lakes.

“There are 180 non-native species in the Great Lakes, many of which came in accidentally. Precisely two of them can be controlled. That’s it. So that’s why biologists and others are very, very concerned about the Asian carp. Once they get in, the cat’s out of the bag.”

Asian Carp were first brought to the states by Southern catfish farmers. The carp escaped the South in the 1990s because of flooding and have been making their way north ever since. These fish are huge. They can grow to four feet and weigh up to 100 pounds, and they reproduce like crazy. In some areas, they reproduce so much that by weight they account for more than 90 percent of the fish in the Mississippi River system.

So you can see why people around the Great Lakes don’t want them.

That’s why Gaden and a lot of other scientists say we should somehow block the man-made canal that connects the big rivers to the Great Lakes for barges carrying cargo.

“We need to be open to saying, just because we’ve been moving goods on the canal by barge for decades and decades, doesn’t mean we need to continue to do it that way. Is there a better way to do it? Can we shift it to rail?”

Gaden and others have been arguing for 15 years to get some kind of permanent barrier built in order to stop invasive species from moving from one ecosystem to another.

“The government agencies that are responsible for doing things on that canal are not moving at the speed of carp, they’re moving at the speed of government. And we don’t have a minute to spare.”

That’s because new DNA tests suggest that Asian carp have moved well beyond the electric barrier meant to keep them out of Lake Michigan.

For The Environment Report, I’m Jennifer Guerra.

Related Links

Interview: Big, Nasty Fish

  • Some biologists worry the Asian Carp will destroy the four-billion dollar fishing industry in the Great Lakes if it gets in. (Photo courtesy of the US Fish and Wildlife Service)

There is a man-made canal that connects
the Mississippi River system with the Great
Lakes. The Chicago Ship and Sanitary Canal
makes shipping cargo between the waterways
possible. It also makes it possible for invasive
pests in the water to invade both systems.
The big concern right now is a big, nasty group
of fish known as Asian Carp that’s already
invaded the Mississippi and some of its
tributaries. An electric barrier has been built
in the canal to try to stop the fish from getting
into the Great Lakes. Lester Graham talked with
Jennifer Nalbone about the problem. She’s the
Director of Navigation and Invasive Species with
the environmental group Great Lakes United:

Transcript

There is a man-made canal that connects
the Mississippi River system with the Great
Lakes. The Chicago Ship and Sanitary Canal
makes shipping cargo between the waterways
possible. It also makes it possible for invasive
pests in the water to invade both systems.
The big concern right now is a big, nasty group
of fish known as Asian Carp that’s already
invaded the Mississippi and some of its
tributaries. An electric barrier has been built
in the canal to try to stop the fish from getting
into the Great Lakes. Lester Graham talked with
Jennifer Nalbone about the problem. She’s the
Director of Navigation and Invasive Species with
the environmental group Great Lakes United:

Jennifer Nalbone: They are just incredible eaters, and they get as big as 3 to 4 feet, 80 to100 pounds when mature. And they are just prolific. Some species, the females can produce over 1 million eggs in their lifetime. So the fear is, like they’ve done in the Mississippi River Basin, they’ll get so big, they’ll have no predators, they’ll eat so much food, and there’ll be so many that they’ll basically take over the ecosystem. In some areas, where they’ve invaded, upwards of 90% of the river’s biomass is carp.

Lester Graham: You’ve probably seen this fish on videos or something like that – they’re the ones that as a boat passes by, they’ll jump out of the river, and sometimes even hit the boaters.

Nalbone: I admit, the first time I saw a video of the jumping silver carp, I was so startled I laughed at it. But there’s nothing funny about 50, 60, 70 pounds of fish flying at you when you’re going 20 miles an hour. It could kill someone.

Graham: Now, there’s this electric barrier in place that actually shocks the water so the fish is discouraged from coming into the area. But now there’s concern that the fish has invaded a nearby river, the Des Planes River, that’s very close to this canal. So, why’s that a problem?

Nalbone: Our concern is with flooding. Just last year, we saw major floodwaters in the Des Planes River, where floodwaters connected the Des Planes and the Chicago Sanitary Ship Canal in streams of water several feet deep. And carp could be carried into the Chicago Sanitary Ship Canal in those floodwaters.

Graham: So, what are you proposing? How could we stop the fish from going any further?

Nalbone: Well, the long-term solution is hydrologic separation of the Mississippi River Basin and the Great Lakes Basin. Army Corps of Engineers has been authorized to study that problem, but that’s a multi-year project. Right now, what we’re concerned about are floodwaters this fall. We are pressing that the Army Corps of Engineers put in place sandbags or berms in the low points between the Des Planes and the Canal. And also fill in some of the culverts in the IMN Canal that connect to the Chicago Sanitary Ship Canal.

Graham: Now, I’ve watched this situation for years – long before the Asian Carp invaded the Mississippi River system – and I’m wondering, even if further millions of dollars are spent, to try to put up barricades or stop this fish, whether it’s simply inevitable that this fish will get into the Great Lakes.

Nalbone: Well, this is a battle against time right now. If we can block the future floodwaters from the Des Planes – which is probably our biggest hole in our defense right now – and plug the culverts in the IMN, we can buy ourselves some good time. But we won’t be out of the woods until we separate the Mississippi and the Great Lakes Basin. But we can’t let this invasion happen. It would be, perhaps, the greatest anticipated ecological tragedy of our time. So, I don’t think that inevitable is an option. We have to get it done.

Graham: Jennifer Nalbone is with the group Great Lakes United. Thanks, Jennifer.

Nalbone: Thank you, Lester.

Related Links

Lessons From a Skyscraper

  • Shawn Allee gets a tour of a roof atop the Willis Tower from co-owner John Huston. The skyscraper will undergo a environmental rehab that will include replacing windows, adding wind turbines and cutting overall energy use. (Photo courtesy of Shawn Allee)

You might have heard the Sears Tower
in Chicago is now called the Willis
Tower. But there’s more changing for
America’s tallest skyscraper. Soon,
the Willis Tower will start an environmental
facelift that could cut eighty-percent
of its energy use. You might wonder:
what could a homeowner learn from what
the Willis Tower is doing? Shawn Allee thought it wouldn’t hurt to ask,
and went on a tour for the answer:

Transcript

You might have heard the Sears Tower
in Chicago is now called the Willis
Tower. But there’s more changing for
America’s tallest skyscraper. Soon,
the Willis Tower will start an environmental
facelift that could cut eighty-percent
of its energy use. You might wonder:
what could a homeowner learn from what
the Willis Tower is doing? Shawn Allee thought it wouldn’t hurt to ask,
and went on a tour for the answer:

One of the co-owners of the Willis Tower is John Huston. He says there’s plenty for
people to learn from the tower’s green rehab plans. To start – we’re at the base of the
tower, and we’re craning our necks up.

“We’re facing north. We’re looking at a hundred and ten floors, so that’s 16
thousand windows in total.”

Huston says those windows are the old single-paned kind common in 1974 – back
when the Willis Tower was finished. In the summer, the windows let heat in, and
during the winter, they let heat escape. And that black metal you see in photos? It
does the same thing.

Huston: “The building is clad in aluminum if you went outside in the winter, you
certainly wouldn’t want to wear an aluminum ski jacket.”

Allee: “You’d freeze.”

Huston: “Exactly.”

So, Huston says the first thing they’re gonna do at the Willis Tower is what he calls
“tighten the building’s envelope.” It means insulating the building from the outer
walls and replacing the windows – all sixteen thousand of ’em.

“It’s an incredible job. That’s what we have to change in order to conserve the 80%
of energy that we anticipate doing.”

Huston says energy consultants pretty much give homeowners the same energy
advice. He says, the nice thing is, once you do that it’s easier to figure out what’s
next.

“Watch your step.”

Huston takes me into the guts of the Willis Tower. This is where it’s heated and
cooled. He says since the building’s gonna waste less energy, he won’t need such
powerful equipment.

Huston: “A lot of what’s in here will disappear or shrink.”

Allee: “So what is this?”

Huston: “This is an electric boiler. It provides hot water to heat the building. Each
one of these consumes enough electricity to heat and light a town of 6,000 people.
We have eight of these throughout the building. It’s not just the boilers. in this
section behind us, you have all the pumps that move hot water throughout the
building. Each one of those pumps is hooked to an electric motor, and 50% of them
can be eliminated.”

Huston says the take-away here is that once a building requires less energy to heat
and cool it, the other savings can kind of cascade from that.

But there’s another lesson homeowners can learn from the Willis Tower’s green
rehab.

The architecture firm that planned this project is called Smith and Gill. Gordan
Gill tells me, their work was made easier by the fact the Willis Tower owners keep
records of their power use.

“When you’re designing something new, you’re predicting the performance of
something. Here, you can actually test it, since you have records of how much
energy was spent, how much energy was used – you know where you stand, exactly.
And so now, you can do mock-ups and tests and things like that.”

Gill says that’s a good reason for homeowners to hold onto their power and heating
bills, too. He says if you’re confident in your actual costs and likely savings, you’re
more likely to follow through with your rehab project.

“And that’s important because you’re avoiding the obsolescence of these buildings,
and I think that’s true from everything like Willis to people’s houses.”

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Who’s to Blame for the Dead Zone

  • It is predicted that the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico is the size of the state of Massachusetts (Photo courtesy of NASA)

About 40% of the continental U-S drains into the Mississippi River. It sends water – and pollution – from across the country into the Gulf of Mexico. A new study shows just who the worst offenders are. Gabriel Spitzer has the story:

Transcript

About 40% of the continental U-S drains into the Mississippi River. It sends water – and pollution – from across the country into the Gulf of Mexico. A new study shows just who the worst offenders are. Gabriel Spitzer has the story:

All the pollution creates a dead zone in the Gulf nearly the size of New Jersey.

Nitrogen and Phosphorus pour in and fertilize big algae blooms.

When that stuff decays, it sucks oxygen out of the water, and makes it impossible for most fish to live there.

US Geological Survey researchers say most of the problem comes from farm runoff, but the single biggest source is sewage from Chicago.

Albert Ettinger with the Environmental and Law Policy Center says Chicago water managers have to catch up with their neighbors.

“They’re gonna have to look at treatment systems which take nitrogen out of the water, and bring phosphorus down to one milligram per liter. It’s done in Milwaukee, it’s done in Cleveland, it’s done in Detroit.”

Chicago’s Metropolitan Water Reclamation District say they haven’t had a chance to look closely at the study yet, so they don’t want to comment on it.

But they don’t like being singled out.

For The Environment Report, I’m Gabriel Spitzer.

Related Links

Pint-Size Cars Sip Energy

  • Neighborhood Electric Vehicles (N.E.V.'s) can go up to 25 mph. The City of Chicago would like to see more people using them for short-distance errands. (Photo by Mike Rhee)

Hybrid cars are all the rage nowadays.

But Mike Rhee reports another car could take the concept of green-friendly vehicles a step farther:

Transcript

Hybrid cars are all the rage nowadays.

But Mike Rhee reports another car could take the concept of green-friendly vehicles a step farther:

These new types of cars are called neighborhood electric vehicles, or N-E-V’s for short.

Now, to me, they look like souped-up golf carts.

But don’t say that to Matt Stewart.

“It gives them a bad name.”

Stewart is the senior automotive equipment analyst, kind of like the car expert, for the City of Chicago.

It owns four of these small electric vehicles.

And Stewart doesn’t like comparing them to golf carts because he says N-E-V’s are much more sophisticated.

“They can go faster than golf carts, I think golf carts are allowed to go up to just under 20 mph, these go between 20-25 is the top speed. They have safety glass windshields, they have mirrors, they have turn signals, brake lights, headlights, and then they have automotive certified safety belts.”

OK, so N-E-V’s are not golf carts–They’re road ready.

And fully electric.

The vehicles are charged with just a regular wall plug and can go up to 40 miles on a single charge.

And this year, Chicago’s approved these vehicles to drive around nearly everywhere in the city.

“Hi, Garrick.”

“How you doin’?”

Garrick Mueller is a truck driver for the city of Chicago.


We’re standing in this huge warehouse that’s filled with fire engines, garbage trucks, and of course, some N-E-V’s.

Mueller says he uses this little vehicle all the time to move around the warehouse.

We buckle in.

“We’re all set, you ready?”

“Yeah.”


“Alright.”

“This is wild.”

“Isn’t it? It’s pretty neat.”

“OK, so we’re about to go on a regular street.”

“Yeah, Elston Avenue, we’re going to make a right. People look at you, they’re like, what is that? See right there– the cops looking at us? They’re like, ‘What is that.’ It’s like when you see a new car on the street you’re like, ‘Wow, look at that.'”

“Now, the ordinance they passed would allow everyday people like you and me have one of these at home. What do you think about being able to drive this around your neighborhood?”

“You know, I like it. I would definitely drive one of these. I mean, the doors come off in the summer, if you had kids and stuff, you could go to the ice cream parlor, have them seat-belted in and go right to the ice cream, you know, it’s nice.”

“That’s actually the goal.”

That’s Eileen Joyce.

She’s assistant commissioner of Chicago’s vehicle fleet.

Right now, Joyce says the city’s testing out the N-E-V’s for its lighter travel needs.

Say a worker needs to drop off a box of pamphlets at a concert.Or a few employees need to drive downtown for a meeting.

Granted, those kinds of trips are the minority compared to most of the city’s work with large vehicles like garbage trucks and snow plows.

But Joyce says the city wants to show residents how useful these vehicles can be, and, if they catch on, she says it could make a big impact on reducing pollution here.

She imagines N-E-V’s parked in driveways and garages everywhere.

“Plug it in overnight, go and run errands, go to the grocery store, the library, Blockbuster, return something, and come back and plug it in without using any fuel or emitting any emissions into the air.”

Joyce says 39 states permit these smaller vehicles to be used in some form or other.

Some businesses have already started using N-E-V’s for things like food and pizza delivery.

So, you may not have seen one yet, but it probably won’t be long before you do.

For The Environment Report, I’m Mike Rhee.

Related Links

Rethinking Window Replacement

  • Jack Spicer of Preservation Chicago is on a campaign to save the venerable 'wood frame window,' like these on his Chicago home. (Photo by Shawn Allee)

Each winter presents some homeowners with a choice: whether to replace old,
wooden windows with modern, energy-efficient ones before cold winds blow
again. Each year, more homeowners choose the replacement windows, often made from vinyl or aluminum. Shawn Allee found some historical preservationists want homeowners to think twice about that:

Transcript

Each winter presents some homeowners with a choice: whether to replace old,
wooden windows with modern, energy-efficient ones before cold winds blow
again. Each year, more homeowners choose the replacement windows, often made from vinyl or aluminum. Shawn Allee found some historical preservationists want homeowners to think twice about that:

If you think century-old windows have to be rickety and leaky, Jack
Spicer would like you to come to his place.

He’s eager to show off windows on his Chicago two-flat, built in 1908.

“So, here’s an example of the way an old-fashioned wood window
looks from the outside a hundred years later. These windows are
longer-lasting and obviously better looking than any replacement window you
can find.”

It’s no surprise Spicer makes this pitch.
He’s with a group called Preservation Chicago, and he’s on a campaign
to save wood-frame windows from the onslaught of vinyl and aluminum-framed
replacements.

Spicer’s losing ground, even in his own neighborhood.

“This apartment building replaced their windows. The next building
replaced all their windows. If you look across the street at this huge
courtyard building, there’re about 48 units in there. Those windows were
fine, and those windows are now trashed. They went into a dumpster and are
now in a landfill somewhere.”

But if old wood-framed windows are so great, why do so many US homeowners
replace them?

“Somebody told them it would save them money if you put in brand-new
replacement windows. Everybody’s taught that – you read about it, you
see the ads. All the replacement window (companies) tell you, if you’re
American and you love your children, you’ll replace your windows. Well,
we’re getting over that now, I hope.”

Spicer insists replacing your windows is not an environmental slam dunk.

He says if old wood-frame windows are properly sealed and have storm
windows, they’ll hold heat almost as well as replacements.

I ask Spicer for numbers on this, and he sends me to Mike Jackson, with
Illinois’ Historic Preservation Agency.

“Several years ago, Vermont as a state did a study and they looked
at repairing windows, adding storm windows, replacing windows, and what it
really came down to was, how leaky are your windows? If they were
reasonably tight, there wasn’t a lot of savings to replacing your windows
at all.”

Jackson says a new furnace or insulation are better pay-offs, and
replacement windows often last just a few decades.

“We’re throwing away items that lasted for a hundred years with
simple technologies and replacing them with more complex things with
shorter life spans. In our line, the reason they call them replacement
windows is because you have to keep replacing them.”

Well, people in the replacement window industry don’t take kindly to
this.

One rep told me the short life span of replacement windows is overblown –
high quality ones last longer.
And he told me, if energy prices rise in the future, replacement windows
become more competitive.

So, is it worth replacing old, wooden windows?

“There’re many factors and that’s why it’s, in our opinion,
not so clear-cut.”

Christian Kohler studies window technology at the Lawrence-Berkeley
National Laboratory.

He says replacement windows are better on energy, but it could take decades
to get a good payback and by that time, you might need to replace them
again.

Anyway, Kohler says there’s an alternative.

If your wood windows are in good condition, you can add storm windows that
have what’s called a “low – E” coating.
The coating helps retain heat.

“It’s applied to glass and it’s virtually invisible. It
doesn’t have a color or anything.”

Kohler says if preservationists want to keep wood windows around on account
of their looks or long-term value, it still makes sense to crack down on
leaks and get good storm windows.

It doesn’t make sense to waste energy on account of beauty when you
don’t have to.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Scientists Hob-Knob in Chicago

  • Former US Vice President Al Gore will deliver a special address to the thousands of scientists gathered at the American Association for the Advancement of Science's meeting this week. (Photo courtesy of the US Department of State)

Thousands of scientists from around the world will be hob-knobbing in Chicago, starting today. They’re going to be celebrating the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin and how he changed science forever. But they won’t be just celebrating – they’ll be thinking through one of the biggest environmental problems we all face:

Transcript

Thousands of scientists from around the world will be hob-knobbing in Chicago starting today. They’re going to be celebrating the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin and how he changed science forever. But they won’t be just celebrating –- they’ll be thinking through one of the biggest environmental problems we all face:

The group’s called the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and they’re putting on their annual meeting – one of the biggest science meet-ups in the world.
This time around there’s plenty of attention on the science of climate change.

The group doesn’t mince words on the issue.

Here’s CEO – Dr. Alan Leschner.

“The last five or more years has been a period of, frankly, denial by the US government about the need to address the problem of global change and its consequences for the world. Now , we think there’s a big opportunity, particularly with the new science appointments made by President Obama to be able to address these kinds of issues in a focused and coherent way.
Scientists there will present work on whether biofuels really help cut carbon emissions, what kind of food crops are best for the climate, and whether we’re losing fish species because global warming.”

And to headline the whole thing – former Vice President Al Gore’s dropping in later this week.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

Related Links

Looking for Answers at the Dump

  • The city of Chicago has hired the company Camp Dresser and McKee to dig through residents' trash and figure out what exactly people are throwing away (Photo by Michael Rhee)

Large cities in the US are still
struggling to find ways to recycle their trash.
That’s because you can’t use the same program
for every high-rise, office building or condo.
One city is trying to attack this problem by
digging through the garbage. Mike Rhee reports:

Transcript

Large cities in the US are still
struggling to find ways to recycle their trash.
That’s because you can’t use the same program
for every high-rise, office building or condo.
One city is trying to attack this problem by
digging through the garbage. Mike Rhee reports:

(sound of trucks beeping)

This is a waste transfer facility on Chicago’s South Side. It’s kind of a temporary dump.

Garbage trucks pick up trash from people’s homes and pile it up here. The piles are then packed
onto even bigger trucks and hauled to landfills far away.

Chris Martel looks over the mounds of trash here. Martel is an engineer, and a solid waste
expert.

“There’s a lot of different paper types here, there’s a plastic bottles, all things that are recyclable.”

But they’re probably not going to be recycled. They’re going to a landfill. That’s why Martel is
here.

He works for a consulting firm called CDM, or Camp Dresser and McKee.

The city of Chicago has hired the company to dig through residents’ trash and figure out what
exactly people are throwing away. Martel has been doing waste sorts like this for more than a
decade.

As we walk to another part of the building, he remembers his first one fondly.

“That’s where I fell in love with my wife, after giving her flowers out of the trash and stuffed
animals out of the trash.”

She didn’t mind they were recycled.

We get to the waste sorting area. There’s a group of workers surrounded by dozens of large and
small bins.

(BOOM)

(laughs) “That boom was the tipper dropping the waste load.”

A rugged, yellow loader dumps about 300 pounds of garbage at our feet. It’s a sample from one
of the large piles in the facility.

A team starts sorting through the garbage.

Scott Keddy is one of them. He picks up a plastic garbage bag.

“We just open it up and see what kind of surprises lie inside, like it could be this #1 plastic PET
bottle, or this rigid, plastic thinga-ma-jobber that did something for somebody at some point,
which is different from that.”

They’re sorting them into 81 different containers. Each one is for a kind of paper, plastic, metal,
food or some other piece of trash.

The point is to figure out how much of each material people are throwing out. And where it’s all
coming from.

Suzanne Malec-McKenna is commissioner for Chicago’s Department of Environment.

She says the tough thing about creating a recycling program in a city like Chicago is the diversity.
Not only do you have residents and businesses creating waste, but restaurants, prisons,
manufacturers for car parts. Each of these creates a different kind of garbage.

The city has been trying to come up with a recycling program that works for everyone for 20
years. Malec-McKenna says the study will help the city decide how to manage it all.

“You can’t have a cookie cutter approach for a city this diverse. You’ve got to come up with a
range of different kind of program options for it. We’ll come up with the right mix.”

But while the city figures recycling out, the garbage will keep piling up in landfills.

Martel, the waste expert, says he hopes that waste is reduced soon. He says most people don’t
understand the sheer quantities of garbage that are out there.

“Unless you physically see and touch it you don’t realize what a large amount it is and what the
implications are and how easy it is to divert these materials.”

Big cities around the country are realizing this, and working on a solution.

For The Environment Report, I’m Michael Rhee.

Related Links

City Chickens and Urban Eggs

  • Linda Nellet brought a few of her birds to a backyard-chicken seminar in Chicago. She and other seasoned urban chicken keepers hope to keep chicken-raising legal and neighborly in their tight, urban landscape. (Photo by Shawn Allee)

Maybe it’s easy to imagine chickens
cooing and clucking on American farms, but
how about in big-city backyards? Well,
keeping chickens is legal in the nation’s
three largest cities, but in one of them,
chicken-lovers nearly lost that right.
Shawn Allee tells how some urban
chicken-keepers were nearly caught off guard,
and how they plan to keep their chickens in
the coop:

Transcript

Maybe it’s easy to imagine chickens
cooing and clucking on American farms, but
how about in big-city backyards? Well,
keeping chickens is legal in the nation’s
three largest cities, but in one of them,
chicken-lovers nearly lost that right.
Shawn Allee tells how some urban
chicken-keepers were nearly caught off guard,
and how they plan to keep their chickens in
the coop:

No one’s sure how many chickens are in Chicago’s backyards. But honestly, few people
thought about it until last year.

That’s when one woman showed up at a city hearing.

“Hi. My name is Edie Cavanaugh, and I’ve lived in Chicago, since 1968.”

Cavanaugh told aldermen she’d caught messy, noisy chickens clucking around her
neighborhood.

She was stunned the city wouldn’t round them up.

“I was told chickens are permitted as pets in Chicago, and I said that’s impossible,
this is a city.”

Cavanaugh’s story ruffled plenty of feathers.

You see, even some aldermen didn’t know that keeping chickens as pets or for eggs in
Chicago is okay.

“I was riding down the street, and I seen a rooster. I was like, ‘What is this?’”

For a month, it seemed Chicago’s city council would ban chicken-keeping.

People who already had chickens worried their birds were destined for the stew pot.

But Chicago aldermen kept chicken-raising legal.

Chicago’s pro-chicken contingent saw the fight as a wake-up call. Some figured, if they
wanted to keep birds, they’d better police themselves.

“So, welcome everybody for coming to the first-ever Chicago backyard Chicken
workshop.”

Martha Boyd is starting seminars about urban chickens.

She’s part of the Angelic Organics Learning Center, a group that promotes urban
agriculture.

Boyd is confident city-people can raise more of their own food if they’re neighborly
about it.

“So the idea of the backyard chicken workshop is so we can have this thing grow
without creating more problems and potentially, then, having the backlash to the
backyard chickens.”

For this first seminar, Boyd invited chicken-raising veterans to a church basement.

One is Tom Rosenfeld.

His advice to urban chicken lovers? Talk to your neighbors. And, hey, if they cringe, get
creative.

“It also helps to bribe them, because if they think they’re going to get some eggs out
of the deal or they think they’re kids come over and pet them or whatever, then of
course they’ll be a little more understanding when one day you leave the door open
and there’re chickens running around the yard or other issues.”

Rosenfeld says those ‘other issues’ arise pretty quickly. In fact, just a few hours after
chickens eat.

“A lot about chicken keeping is about poop because they do it a lot. They do it in
surprisingly large quantities at a time.”

Rosenfeld says you can literally get ankle deep in the stuff if you’re not vigilant.

But bribery helps here, too. Rosenfeld says chicken poop makes excellent garden
compost.

“Our neighbors love it. They’ll come by with a bucket and that’s their way of
participating.”

Rosenfeld says the last issue that ticks off neighbors is noise.

There’s no such thing as a chicken muzzle, but there’s still a solution – and there’s no
bribe necessary.

You see, male chickens are the noisy bunch, so if you just want eggs…

“You don’t need a rooster. It’s a sad reality as a male chicken keeper to realize that
roosters aren’t necessary. They’re only necessary if you want chicks.”

Rosenfeld says urban chicken-raising could catch on where it’s legal – if people keep a lid
on noise and smells.

As for places where it’s not legal?

You might want to change the law at city hall – just don’t try to bribe your alderman with
fresh eggs.

For The Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.

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New Pcb Chemical Found in the Air

  • One study found PCB-11 in 90% of the air samples from Chicago (Photo by Lester Graham)

A potentially toxic chemical called
PCB-11 has been found all over the air in a
major city. That’s surprising, because people
thought the chemical hadn’t been used in years.
Gabriel Spitzer reports regulators could start
looking in other cities:

Transcript

A potentially toxic chemical called
PCB-11 has been found all over the air in a
major city. That’s surprising, because people
thought the chemical hadn’t been used in years.
Gabriel Spitzer reports regulators could start
looking in other cities:

Keri Hornbuckle says not much is known about PCB-11.

That’s because no one really expected to stumble on it.

“This finding is important, and I think it’s alarming. We should find out what the
health effects are for this chemical.”

Hornbuckle is a University of Iowa professor.

She looked at air samples from all over Chicago, and found the chemical in about 90% of
the samples.

She says the source is a mystery, though it might come from paints breaking down.

“Now, it could be that in all those places where we would expect to see the other
PCBs, we’d also see this one. But it’s a surprise, because no one thought it would be
produced.”

Hornbuckle says she found PCB-11 using a new, detailed way of analyzing air samples.

Other PCBs have been linked to cancer and neurological problems.

For The Environment Report, I’m Gabriel Spitzer.

Related Links