Tag: jeff

Interview: Book Blames Coast Guard for Invaders

  • Ships sometimes bring unwanted travelers with them (Photo by Lester Graham)

Invasive species hitchike on foreign cargo ships and end up in US waterways. Lester Graham talked with the author of a new book about why the government has done so little to stop these aquatic invaders that are damaging the environment:

Transcript

Invasive species hitchike on foreign cargo ships and end up in US waterways.
Lester Graham talked with the author of a new book about why the government has done so little to stop these aquatic invaders that are damaging the environment:

Lester Graham: “Maybe you’ve heard about Zebra Mussels. The thumbnail-sized mussels have invaded freshwater lakes, rivers, clogged water intake pipes, and damaged the environment across a good portion of the US – and they’re still spreading. The Zebra Mussel is just one of dozens and dozens of invasive species brought into the US by foreign cargo ships entering the Great Lakes though the St. Lawrence Seaway, which connects the Atlantic Ocean to the Great Lakes. What happens is ships in Europe or Africa or Asia take on ballast water, sucking up millions of gallons of water from a foreign port. Aquatic life is sucked up with it. Then, as the ships take on cargo in the Great Lakes, the ballast water is discharged, and with it things like Zebra Mussels and other foreign pests. Many of those species have spread from the Great Lakes into the Mississippi River system, and then transported by recreational boating in every direction from there. Jeff Alexander has written a book that chronicles not only those invasions, but the utter failure of the government to do anything effective to stop these introductions. Jeff, you make the argument that these invasive species, biological pollution if you will, amount to a more serious environmental disaster than the Exxon-Valdez oil spill in Alaska. How’s that?”

Jeff Alexander: “Well the Valdez, there’s no discounting the severity of the Valdez oil spill. But oil spills, over time, can be cleaned up to a certain extent, and the ecosystem can recover. In the Great Lakes, ocean freighters have brought in 57 species, they’ve caused billions of dollars in damage, and they’ve transformed the entire ecosystem.”

Graham: “There are eight states that border the Great Lakes, and members of Congress are aware of this problem, why haven’t they taken action to ensure this problem is dealt with once and for all?”

Alexander: “The shipping lobby has been very effective at keeping regulations at bay, the Coast Guard, which is the lead agency in the US, has just totally dropped the ball on this issue. They’re the ones who’re supposed to be the guardians of the Great Lakes when it comes to ships, and the Coast Guard is very close to the shipping industry. They have social events together every year. A lot of people blame the shipping industry for this problem, but I tend not to. They certainly have fought the regulations but, in the end, the reason that we have regulatory agencies is to protect public health and the environment. And our regulatory agencies haven’t done the job, and our politicians haven’t done the job – no one seems to have the backbone to stand up to the shipping industry and deal with this problem.”

Graham: “Are the foreign ships that bring in this cargo and take away grain or the other things from the Midwest so economically valuable that it is worth this economic and environmental cost?”

Alexander: “There is some debate on that, but the best economic study estimated if we kept these ocean freighters out of the Great Lakes, made them offload their cargo in Montreal and put it on trains and trucks, it would cost us an extra $55 million a year to move that cargo. That’s compared to the estimate of $200 million a year that foreign species are costing us in terms of economic and environmental damage. It’s not a stretch to make the case that the environmental and economic costs have far exceeded the economic benefits.”

Graham: “Jeff Alexander’s new book is ‘Pandora’s Locks: The Opening of the Great Lakes St. Lawrence Seaway’. Thanks, Jeff.”

Alexander: “Thank you.”

Jeff Alexander spoke with The Environment Report’s Lester Graham.

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Snakes in Suburbia

  • The timber rattlesnake has been wiped out in several states in the East and Northeast and is not doing well in the Midwest. (Photo by David Larson, Saint Louis Zoo)

Scientists are worried that
snakes living in sprawling areas could be affected.
In one region, researchers have implanted dozens of
snakes with radio transmitters. Julie Bierach reports, it’s part of an effort to prevent a
decline in the snake population and educate people
that they can live with them:

Transcript

Scientists are worried that
snakes living in sprawling areas could be affected.
In one region, researchers have implanted dozens of
snakes with radio transmitters. Julie Bierach reports, it’s part of an effort to prevent a
decline in the snake population and educate people
that they can live with them:


Wayne Drda loves snakes:


“I think they’re really neat animals.”


In this wilderness area, Drda and his team are studying the basic movement patterns and habitat use of
Timber rattlesnakes and Osage copperheads:


“A lot of the wildlife areas, are being surrounded by subdivisions and homes, and some are
completely surrounded. And so the animals tend to wander out of the wildlife areas into
backyards and many of them don’t survive that.”



The timber rattlesnake already has been wiped out in several states in the East and Northeast. And the
timber rattler is not doing very well in many states in the Midwest. Drda says snakes in general get a
bad rap. A lot of people don’t like them, so otherwise peaceful people can turn into what he calls “nature
vigilantes,” and they kill snakes on sight:


“Well, I guess the most common way is with a shovel. That’s always the common joke, the
shovel. (Laughs)”


Drda wants to prevent that from happening as often in his area. He’s the field manager for the Pitviper
Research Project at Washington University’s Tyson Research Center near the suburbs of St. Louis,
Missouri. He’s trying to help suburbanites understand that the Timber rattler is a much less aggressive
species of rattlesnakes.


Drda and his team have implanted 26 snakes with the radio transmitters, and track them daily using a
GPS system. Ryan Turnquist is one of the students tracking the snakes:


“And basically we use that to map it on an area photo and determine how far the snake moved,
where the snake moved, what kind of habitat they used, home range size.”


On this day, they’ve already tracked 8 snakes. And now, they’re on their way to find another. Turnquist
turns on the GPS system. And we begin to plow through the woods. Each snake has been named and assigned its own frequency on the transmitter.
The 4-foot-long male rattlesnake we’re tracking has been named Aron.


As we get closer, the signal gets stronger. Turnquist leads the way pointing the big steel antenna in
several directions. And then, we see him. Aron is lying in the sun, half coiled, near a log . He blends in
with the pile of leaves that surround him. He doesn’t rattle, but instead is still, hoping we don’t see him.
Wayne Drda has been studying snakes for 40 years. He knows what Aron is up to:


“This snake is probably in the most conspicuous situation you can find him in, except being out in
the road. He’s not going to give away his position by doing anything until he feels like he’s
really threatened. I mean he knows we’re here, but he’s probably not going to rattle.”


That happens a lot more often than you expect. Drda says they’ve already tracked some snakes that
have made their way to backyards of homes in the area. And the homeowners don’t even know it:


“We’ve been trackin’ this one snake, her name is Hortence. She’s basically been in somebody’s
backyard now for three weeks I guess.”


So far, the team has learned that the male timber rattlers have a larger home range. They breed in late
summer, or early fall, and they never breed with females from the same den where the males hibernate.


Jeff Ettling is with the St. Louis Zoo. He’s conducting a DNA analysis to determine which areas need to
be kept open so the snakes can travel back and forth without running into someone with a shovel:


“If we can get enough samples within a given area, we should be able to tell what the relatedness is
and which males are moving between dens. That’s what we’re hoping to find out. I mean, we have a good
idea by tracking them where they go. But which females are they breeding with from different
dens we really don’t have any idea right now.”


The research team is finding new scientific information about the snakes. But, they say the ultimate
goal is to explain to the people who live in the area that you can live with the rattlesnakes. They don’t
have to kill them. Drda wants people who find a timber rattler in their backyard to call a herpetologist,
instead of running for the shovel.


For the Environment Report, I’m Julie Bierach.

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Farmers Respond to Peer Pressure

  • Farming is big business in America's heartland. Many farmers say they want to be left alone to run their farms the way they always have - and they don't want government regulators or researchers dictating to them. (Photo by Rebecca Williams)

Farm pollution is the biggest water contamination problem in the
nation. But government agencies often struggle with getting farmers to
use less polluting farming methods. Many farmers say they don’t want
outsiders telling them what to do. Rebecca Williams reports one
grassroots project is trying to encourage farmers to change, by relying
on peer pressure:

Transcript

Farm pollution is the biggest water contamination problem in the
nation. But government agencies often struggle with getting farmers to
use less polluting farming methods. Many farmers say they don’t want
outsiders telling them what to do. Rebecca Williams reports one
grassroots project is trying to encourage farmers to change, by relying
on peer pressure:


(Sound of birds and buzzing insects)


The corn around here is way over knee high, and there’s a whole lot of
it. This is Iowa, after all. So, pretty much everyone farms corn and
soybeans.


But there isn’t as much farming happening today. Dozens of farmers are
hanging out by a creek that meanders through farmland. They’re
checking out the day’s catch.


(Sound of splashing around in bucket)


“Now there’s one really bright-colored southern red belly in here, kind
of the prettiest fish we’ve got in this stretch.”


Biologist Dan Kirby just used an electroshocker. It stuns the fish and
they float to the top of the water. Now that he can see them, he can
get an idea of how many fish there are and how big they are. The
farmers are watching closely.


(Farmer:) “That’s a real good sign to see them that big, at this
point?”


(Kirby:) “Yeah, especially the southern red belly – they do classify
them a little bit different, they consider them to be a sensitive
species, so it’s a good thing to have them there at that adult size,
for sure.”


That’s better news than they might’ve been expecting. This creek
running along many of the farmers’ fields is in trouble. It’s on
Iowa’s impaired waters list. In this case, that means the fish and
other aquatic life in the creek are not doing as well as they should
be.


“In some of these streams we have had some rough times. Chronic issues
where fish were not even getting to size they could catch them or else
were just plain absent.”


Dan Kirby says farm pollution such as excess fertilizer and soil
erosion from farm fields can harm fish and other stream life. That’s
the kind of thing that put this creek on the government’s watch list
three years ago.


One of the farmers, Jeff Pape, remembers hearing about that. For him it was a big
red flag:


“We knew there was an impaired waterway and it was running through some
of the land I rent and obviously I don’t want that to shine on me… I
didn’t want the DNR – not that they would or have the time to do
it, but I didn’t want them to come in and say hey, you will be doing
this, or you will be doing that.”


Pape says the fear of being dictated to by the government was a strong
motivator for him and a few of his neighbors. In late 2004, Pape
formed a watershed council with nine of his farming neighbors.


Now there are nearly 50 farmers in the group. Pape says there are some ground
rules: No finger pointing. And everyone gets equal say:


“That’s nice with this group – nobody’s telling them they have to do
anything – they do what they want when they want and that’s it. You
know, they don’t do any more than they want to.”


Pape says he’s proud of what he and his neighbors have gotten done.
They’re installing grass strips along ditches and creeks to filter
water rushing off fields. They’re putting in fences to keep cattle
from tearing up stream beds and banks. They’re being more careful
about how much fertilizer they apply.


Maybe most importantly, they’ve gotten a lot of their neighbors to join
them. Jeff Pape says cash incentives help – farmers are paid for the
conservation projects they do. It’s not as much money as some of the
government’s conservation programs, but it keeps the government out of
their hair.


Pape says this program works because there’s an even stronger
motivation:


“That guy’s looking over your fence – he sees you ain’t got a waterway
and you’re thinking about it, so that peer pressure thing does make a
difference too. You know everybody’s watching each other in this
watershed – not pointing fingers at nobody but everybody’s watching
each other and that keeps people on their toes – they want things to
look right, too.”


Other farmers here agree that a farmer-to-farmer project is going to be
much more effective than anything government regulators or researchers
say.


John Rodecap is with Iowa State University Extension Service. He’s
been helping these farmers clean up the creek. He says it’s remarkable
that more than half of the farmers in this 23,000-acre watershed have
signed on.


“The trials that they do, they talk about it at their coffee shop, they
talk about it over the fence… If the trial’s done 50, 60, 100 miles
away, that’s not good enough. They want to know how it’s gonna work on
my farm.”


Rodecap says if you see your neighbor making a change first, you’re
going to feel a little more comfortable giving it a try yourself. And
knowing your neighbor’s watching you over the fence… that’s a powerful
incentive all its own.


For the Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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Co2 Crops Not Tops

  • Theories that crops, such as the corn in Illinois, will benefit from increases in CO2 might not be as good as predicted. (Photo by Scott Bauer, courtesy of the USDA Agricultural Research Service)

Carbon dioxide emissions from our cars and factories are the number one
cause of global warming. Scientists have long theorized that more of
the gas in the atmosphere could actually help farmers grow bigger
plants. But new research from America’s Breadbasket is challenging
that assumption. David Sommerstein reports:

Transcript

Carbon dioxide emissions from our cars and factories are the number one
cause of global warming. Scientists have long theorized that more of
the gas in the atmosphere could actually help farmers grow bigger
plants. But new research from America’s Breadbasket is challenging
that assumption. David Sommerstein reports:


Lin Warfel’s a fourth generation farmer in east-central Illinois. His
fields are flat and endless, the soil chunky and black and just about
the best in the world. An Interstate highway groans on one side of his
cornfield:


“In my career, early on, there was no Interstate past my farm.”


As traffic increased over the years, Warfel noticed a strange
phenomenon. The crops closer to the Interstate grew bigger than those
further away:


“They respond to the carbon dioxide. They can stay greener longer than
plants out into the field.”


OK… so, here’s a high school biology reminder: carbon dioxide, along
with water and sun, is an ingredient in photosynthesis, which makes
plants grow.


Increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is also the biggest cause
of global warming. So scientists thought, huh, more carbon dioxide in
the atmosphere, bigger crops. They even coined a term: the “carbon
dioxide fertilization effect:”


“The effects of CO2 on crop yields are fairly well-understood.”


The Department of Energy’s Jeff Amthor has studied this stuff since the
1980s:


“We would expect that by the year 2050, that the increase in CO2 alone
would probably increase yields by about 10 to 15% in soybean, wheat and
rice relative to today’s yield, with nothing else changing.”


Other things are changing, like hotter temperatures and more drought.
But the predominant thinking has been that the increased carbon dioxide
will moderate those negative factors, maybe even outweigh them. A
recent study by the American Economic Review concluded U.S. agriculture
profits will grow by more than a billion dollars over the next century,
due to global warming. Most of this is based on experiments done in
controlled, greenhouse conditions, but new research done in real fields
is challenging the assumptions:


“Where you’re standing is what we refer to as our global change
research facility on the south farms of the University of Illinois.”


That’s biologist Steve Long. He runs what’s called the SoyFACE project
at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. Here, Long can
actually pipe carbon dioxide gas out to the fields, and grow real crops
in an atmosphere of the future.


Long strolls out to one of 16 test plots and stop at a white pipe
sticking out of the ground:


“This is one of the pipes where the carbon dioxide actually comes up
and then it will go out into the field here.”


The carbon dioxide pipes circle a plot about the size of a tennis
court. They release the gas over the crops. Computers monitor the air
to keep the concentrations steady:


“And the current atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide is about
380 parts per million. We’re raising that to the level which is
expected for the year 2050, which is about 550 parts per million.”


Long has grown the crops of 2050 for 5 years now. His results
shocked him. The plants did grow bigger. They survived longer
into the fall, but the yields were 50% lower than expected. And
pests thrived. The Western corn rootworm, for example, laid
twice as many eggs:


“Japanese beetle, which eats quite a lot of the leaves of soybeans, do
twice as well under these elevated CO2 conditions. They live longer. They
produce many more young. The yield increases we’ve seen could start to be
counteracted by those increased pest problems.”


Long’s results found supporters and critics when published in
Science magazine last summer. Some researchers say extra CO2
could hurt agriculture more than it helps because weeds become more
aggressive.


The Department of Energy’s Jeff Amthor co-wrote a paper challenging the
interpretation of Long’s data. But he agrees more work needs to be
done in real-life conditions:


“The bigger questions that are now before us are the interactions of CO2 with
warming and change in precip, changes in weed communities, changes in
insect communities, changes in disease outbreak. There are a lot more
questions there than there are answers.”


Amthor says what’s at stake is our future food supply.


For The Environment Report, I’m David Sommerstein.

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Locally Grown Food Sprouts in Restaurants

  • More people want to get locally grown food. Restaurants are picking up on the trend, but there's a shortage of farmers growing local produce. (Photo by Lester Graham)

One of the hot trends expected in restaurants this year is
the use of locally-grown, seasonal foods. But finding those
products can be challenging for chefs, even in the middle of
farm country. Julie Grant tells the story of one restaurant
that’s closing after years of seeking out local meats and
vegetables:

Transcript

One of the hot trends expected in restaurants this year is
the use of locally-grown, seasonal foods. But finding those
products can be challenging for chefs, even in the middle of
farm country. Julie Grant tells the story of one restaurant
that’s closing after years of seeking out local meats and
vegetables:


All Parker Bosley ever wanted was food that tasted good.
He’s a chef and he wanted his food to be satisfying, but
when he got into the restaurant business more than twenty
years ago he thought something was wrong with the food he
was cooking:


“I thought, there’s something wrong with this business in that
I don’t think my food was that great, even though I’m cooking very well.”


Bosley decided the problem was that he wasn’t starting with
good enough ingredients, and that mediocre ingredients
couldn’t create great-tasting food:


“And I thought about it, and I thought, I don’t have real chickens,
I don’t have good tomatoes, I don’t have good lettuce, and so forth…
it’s coming through a commercial source, so I thought, something’s wrong here.
I used to have wonderful chickens and wonderful tomatoes and strawberries when I was
growing up on a farm in Ohio…what happened to that?”


Bosley is probably Cleveland most highly-renown gourmet, but he decided
to put on his boots and headed home to the farm. Well, it wasn’t exactly his farm, but
he started driving around unnamed country roads. He was looking for small farms and road-side stands.
He’d use the chickens, eggs, tomatoes he brought back to
create dishes at his restaurant, and he liked the results:


“Once I got started and into that and realized, I was right, I was correct
your food cannot be better then the food with
which you begin.”


Bosley built his reputation, his restaurants, and his menu by
building relationships with farmers. And now nearly every
ingredient in almost every dish – from the squash and bacon
soup with hazelnuts, the mixed greens with goat cheese and
honey-thyme dressing, and even the beef medallions with
mushrooms and wine sauce – they all come from local farms.


Parker’s restaurant has been recognized more than once by
Gourmet magazine as one of the top 50 in the country, but
it’s not always easy to gather those ingredients. Sometimes
farmers just don’t have as much as the restaurant needs.
Jeff Jaskiel is Bosley’s business partner:


“We have our little qualifier in our menu, if you read it, it says ‘Sorry, we’re out
of this tonight.’ And we’ve gone through periods where we don’t have chicken on the menu for three
or four days and if you go to a restaurant and couldn’t find chicken on the menu, people would think you’re
a little bit strange.”


So, they get a lot of complaints:


“‘Why are you out of this?’ The later tables come in at 9, 9:30 and we’re out of three or four things
and they’re a little bit disappointed and we were only able to get so much in this week and I think they
try to understand and they do come back so I guess what we’re doing still means something to them.”


It’s starting to mean enough to enough people that the
National Restaurant Association expects local, seasonal
foods to be one of the hottest trends in restaurants this
year.


Lots of restaurants in New York or California already identify
exactly where each ingredient on the menu comes from, what
farm it came from, and how it was produced. But as his long-time passion
becomes hot, Parker’s restaurant is closing.


(Sound of talking)


Today Bosley is standing in the wind and cold, but it’s
still sunny outside. He’s at one of Cleveland’s newly budding farm
markets. It’s set up in the parking lot of a new outdoor
shopping mall and it’s near a new upscale neighborhood. There are
about 20 stands, with things like heritage chickens and turkeys, cheese from grass-fed cows,
and lots with apples. All the products come from nearby farms. Bosley’s call for
local produce was a big part of creating what’s now a
network of markets like this throughout the region:


“I’m doing a lot more than just making good food and maybe buying direct from a farmer. I am
doing the right thing for the environment, I am doing the right thing for rural
communities, I am doing the right thing for urban communities. I never start out, oh, I want to
be an environmentalist, and I’m going to out and hug trees and save the countryside. I just
want good food, which, if you pursue it correctly, you will be
an environmentalist.”


Bosley’s 68 now and he sees the next phase of his career in
encouraging more farmers to grow gourmet mushrooms, make
goat cheese, or build greenhouses so that there’s lettuce other
produce available for the growing market of chefs and other
people who want good local food year round.


For the Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Fish and Wildlife Service to Cut Staff

More job cuts might be on the way at National Wildlife
Refuges, but the new Congress will apparently be taking a
closer look at reductions announced by the US Fish and
Wildlife Service. Chuck Quirmbach reports:

Transcript

More job cuts might be on the way at National Wildlife
Refuges, but the new Congress will apparently be taking a
closer look at reductions announced by the US Fish and
Wildlife Service. Chuck Quirmbach reports:


The fish and wildlife agency already has announced plans to
cut more than 250 jobs over the next three years. Further
cuts are expected soon.


The agency blames a flat budget and rising operational and
personnel costs, but Jeff Ruch of Public Employees for
Environmental Responsibility says visitors to the affected
refuges will find a less enjoyable experience at no real
savings in tax dollars:


“All the cutbacks in the refuge system are less than what
we’re spending in Iraq in a day. I mean to put it in some
perspective, we’re talking about literally millions of
dollars versus billions of dollars that are being
hemorrhaged out of other government operations.”


Democratic Congressman Ron Kind co-chairs a caucus on
wildlife refuges. He says he’ll try to address the job cuts
in the next federal budget.


For the Environment Report, I’m Chuck Quirmbach

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Migrant Workers: Still Harvest of Shame?

  • Most migrant labor camps provide housing only for single men, but the Zellers farm in Hartville, OH allows entire families to migrate and, for those of age, to work together in the fields. (Photo by Gary Harwood )

It might sound obvious, but America needs to grow and harvest food. The problem is
that many Americans don’t want to work on farms anymore. That’s why some farm
owners recruit workers from Mexico and other places. During the growing season,
nearly 300 workers and their children live in migrant camps around the K. W. Zellers
family farm in rural northeast Ohio. Julie Grant spent some time at the Zellers’ farm this
fall and has this story:

Transcript

It might sound obvious, but America needs to grow and harvest food. The problem is
that many Americans don’t want to work on farms anymore. That’s why some farm
owners recruit workers from Mexico and other places. During the growing season,
nearly 300 workers and their children live in migrant camps around the K. W. Zellers
family farm in rural northeast Ohio. Julie Grant spent some time at the Zellers’ farm this
fall and has this story:


For many Americans, just tending a small garden can be too much labor. But the
Mexican workers on the Zellers Farm in Hartville, Ohio are moving quickly down rows
of lettuce hundreds of yards long.


One man crouches down and cuts four heads of romaine. He’s leaning over the plants all
day long. It’s backbreaking work, but he moves spryly to the next row, and the next, and
the next. He’ll only make about 3 cents per head, so he wants to cut as many heads as
quickly as possible. Another worker follows him, loading the lettuce into boxes, then
lifting the 30 to 40 pound boxes and throwing them on to a flatbed truck, one after
another.


Farm owner Jeff Zellers says most people who live around here don’t want to do this:


“No. We can probably hire ten people and one of them will last more than a week, who
will stay here work, and work through it.”


Out in another field, a different crew is working in the harshest heat of the day. They get
a little protection from straw hats and some are wearing rubber pants. They need to protect
their legs from the hot, black, mucky soil. The temperature of the dirt can get up to 110
degrees.


Two generations of the Soto family of Mexico work together thinning lettuce. They
work down the long rows using a hoe, or crouching down and pulling out weeds by hand.
25-year-old Ivan Soto has become an expert, after thinning lettuce at the Zellers farm for
the past nine years:


“We don’t do other jobs, only one job.”


Ivan Soto pretty much taught himself English. He’s gone through the process to become
a US citizen. Now his wife has joined him and his family on the lettuce-thinning crew.
Other crews specialize in growing cilantro, parsley, and radishes. Zellers says the farm
depends on this expertise:


“We have to deliver
product on a daily basis that is as good or better then our competitors. And if we do not
have a trained labor force to do that, we’re not going to long term be in business.”


The Zellers farm pays less then some others because it has set up temporary homes
around the perimeter of the farm. Most of the homes look like small trailers. But they
come furnished and the farm pays most of the workers’ living expenses. Most migrant
farm workers make 11 to 14 thousand dollars a year. Ivan Soto says it’s hard, boring
work, but they make a good enough living that when they return to Mexico they can
afford to rest for awhile.


That’s a big reason their family, including his wife and young son, his parents, four
siblings, an aunt and uncle, have traveled from their home outside Mexico City to this
small northeast Ohio town for going on a decade now:


“When we are here, we say, well, we are now in our second home, because over there is our first home this is our home because here in Ohio is our second home for us.”


While most farms provide migrant housing only for single men,
Jeff Zellers allows entire families to migrate and work together in the fields. He hopes
his own children understand all the labor it takes to provide a meal:


“When we return thanks before we eat dinner, we pray for the people that prepared and produced the food. If my childen do nothing else but understand that their food did not show up in the grocery store because that’s where it was, it just came off an assembly line, I would want them to do that.”


For the Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

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Part 3: Zero Emission Hydrogen Future?

  • Underneath the hood of a hydrogen powered car. (Photo courtesy of US Department of Energy)

You’ve probably heard that the auto industry is looking into hydrogen as a possible fuel for future cars and trucks. Hydrogen offers the potential for cars with close to zero harmful emissions, but those cars won’t be on the roads in big numbers anytime soon. Dustin Dwyer has this look at what’s being done now to get ready for a hydrogen future:

Transcript

You’ve probably heard that the auto industry is looking into Hydrogen as a possible fuel for future cars and trucks. Hydrogen offers the potential for cars with close to zero harmful emissions, but those cars won’t be on the roads in big numbers anytime soon. Dustin Dwyer has this look at what’s being done now to get ready for a hydrogen future:


To many people, hydrogen-powered cars might sound about as legitimate as flying cars. They both seem like really good ideas. Hydrogen could lead to cars that have basically no harmful emissions. Flying cars are just cool. For flying cars, the technology hasn’t come through. That’s despite all the promises of countless sci-fi movies.


But people in the auto industry insist hydrogen cars are the real deal, and they’re backing it up with real investment money. General Motors, the world’s biggest car company, has spent more than $1 billion already to develop hydrogen fuel cells.


Julie Beamer is GM’s director of fuel cell commercialization. She says things such as biofuels and gas-electric hybrid technology are important in the short term.


“But ultimately, you are back to what is the long-term sustainable solution? We believe very strongly, it is hydrogen and fuel cell technology.”


At GM, hydrogen fuel cells represent a complete reinvention of the automobile. The internal combustion engine, which has powered nearly every car for the past century, is out. And there’s a lot of other high-tech gadgetry in GM’s prototype hydrogen vehicles.


But Hydrogen doesn’t have to be a revolution. You can actually use existing engines.


Jeff Schmidt is an engineer with Ovonic Hydrogen Systems in Michigan. He’s hooking a hydrogen pump up to a modified Toyota Prius.


“You can hear the fuel is pushing through the nozzle, there are orifices and it just whistles as it’s fueling up.”


This is a pump that looks like any other gas pump you see. It has a few extra tubes and wires, but basically it works the same as gas pumps you use all the time. As Schmidt jumps behind the wheel, he says that was the idea with the prototype car, as well.


“The car is very similar to standard Prius in function and drivability. Simply a matter of getting in the car, seat belt, push the power button to start.”


Essentially, Ovonics just pulled out the standard gas tank, and put in a tank that could safely store Hydrogen. That tank is a little bit heavier than a normal gas tank, and you lose some horsepower from an engine that was originally built for gasoline. But Schmidt says for the most part, this hydrogen powered car works the same as your car does. It just uses a cleaner fuel.


And the technology is pretty much ready to go. Schmidt says the car could be mass produced and put on the roads right away. The problem is nobody would know where to fill up.


“That has to be worked out. I mean, we see a gas station on every corner right now.”


Gary Vasilash is editor of Automotive Design and Production magazine. He points out there are already problems with just getting biofuels such as ethanol into gas stations, and he says getting Hydrogen to filling stations will be much worse.


“People are talking about, ‘Well, gee it’s so difficult to get ethanol,’ you know, and ethanol’s from corn, right? Well, where is there free hydrogen? Nowhere.”


The most talked about way of getting hydrogen at least in the short term, is from a process involving fossil fuels, but that process would create heavy CO2 emissions on the production side. So the total measure of pollution from cars, what’s called the well-to-wheel impact, might only be cut in half compared to current levels.


So GM’s Julie Beamer says the ultimate goal is using renewable wind or solar electricity to pull Hydrogen out of water through electrolysis.


“Those sources obviously, while they’re near term not as economically attractive as what natural gas would be, but the renewable-based options do represent to completely eliminate greenhouse gas emissions through the total well-to-wheel basis.”


That could be a big, big improvement for the environment. But no one can really say how long it might take. In the meantime, auto companies and researchers continue to work on the incremental steps, while the rest of us wait for the era of truly clean automobiles to take flight.


For the Environment Report, I’m Dustin Dwyer.

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Making Room for Wildlife in the City

  • Natural areas aren't the first thing that come to mind when you think of the city of Chicago, but the city has recently released a plan to protect the ones they have. (Photo by Lester Graham)

One of the biggest cities in the U.S. is trying out a new approach to protect its natural areas. Rebecca Williams reports the city’s mapping out the hidden little places that get overlooked:

Transcript

One of the biggest cities in the U.S. is trying out a new approach to protect
its natural areas. Rebecca Williams reports it’s mapping out the hidden
little places that get overlooked:


(Sound of birds and buzzing bugs)


You might forget you’re in Chicago as you walk up the path to the Magic
Hedge. It’s a big honeysuckle hedge planted as screening for a missile base
on this land that juts out into Lake Michigan like a crooked finger. When
the Army left in the 70’s, the hedge grew wilder. Migrating birds have been
going nuts over this little area ever since.


“It’s kind of like a bird motel, where on their trips they can stop and rest
and re-energize before they take off again. So it’s just a wonderful
natural oasis within this very dense urban city.”


Jerry Adelmann’s been a fan of green space in the city for decades. He’s
the chair of Mayor Richard Daley’s Nature and Wildlife Committee. Two years
back, Adelmann suggested making a comprehensive inventory of Chicago’s last
remaining scraps of habitat.


“We have some of the rarest ecosystems on the globe – tall grass prairie
remnants, oak savanna, some of our wetland communities are extraordinarily
rare, rarer than the tropical rainforest, and yet they’re here in our forest
preserves and our parks, and in some cases, unprotected.”


The city recently unveiled a new plan to protect these little places in the
city. The Nature and Wildlife Plan highlights one hundred sites, adding up
to almost 5,000 acres. Most of the sites are already part of city
parks or forest lands, but until recently, they didn’t have special
protection.


Kathy Dickhut is with Chicago’s planning department. She says before
Chicago’s recent zoning reform, these sites the city wanted to protect were
zoned as residential or commercial areas. Now they’re zoned as natural
areas.


“Buildings aren’t allowed, parking lots aren’t allowed. This area is not
going to be zoned for any other active use whereas other parts of the parks
we have field houses, zoos, ball fields, but in these areas we’re not going
to have structures.”


Dickhut says even though land’s at a premium in the city, the planning
department hasn’t run into a lot of opposition with the new habitat plan.
She says she just got a lot of blank looks. Local officials were surprised
the city wanted these small pockets of land.


And that actually worked in the city’s favor.
The city’s been able to acquire new lands for habitat that no one else wanted.


“As a rule we don’t like to take the throwaways for parks and habitat. But
in some cases, habitat lands work well where other things won’t work well.
If you’ve got a road and a river and a very skinny piece of land that won’t fit
anything else, that’s good for habitat, because anywhere where land meets water is
good for habitat.”


The city’s also turning an old parking lot back into sand dunes and
elevated train embankments into strips of green space. And though some of this land
isn’t exactly prime real estate, the city does get donations with a little
more charisma.


In Chicago’s industrial southeast side, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
discovered bald eagles nesting in the area for the first time in a century.
The birds were nesting on a 16 acre plot owned by Mittal Steel USA. The
city got the company to donate the land.


Lou Schorsch is a CEO of the steel company:


“Of course, you always would like to keep the option, it’s close to the
facility, if the facility expands, you could put a warehouse there, but we
had no immediate plans for it and I think when the city approached us, given
this unique circumstance of eagles returning to nest there, frankly it was a
relatively easy decision for us.”


(Sound of crickets)


Surplus land and a symbolic bird helped the city’s cause in this case. But
the city’s Nature and Wildlife Chair Jerry Adelmann hopes this can be the
beginning of a national trend.


Adelmann says preserving remnants of habitat on industrial lands fits into
Mayor Daley’s larger green vision for the city. It’s a vision Jerry Adelmann thinks doesn’t have to
be at odds with the city’s industrial past.


“I’ve had friends come visit and they think of Chicago as this industrial
center, City of Big Shoulders, gangsters and whatever and then they suddenly
see this physical city that’s so beautiful. Our architecture is world-famous but also our public spaces, our natural areas, our parks I think are
becoming world-famous as well.”


But Adelmann admits it’s early yet. It’s too soon to know how well these
remnants of land will function as habitat and what the city might need to
do to make them better. He says while it’s important to provide green
spaces for birds and bugs, these places are even more important for the people
who live in Chicago. Especially people whose only contact with wildlife
might be in the city.


For the Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

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MAKING ROOM FOR WILDLIFE IN THE CITY (Short Version)

One of the biggest cities in the U.S. has released a plan to protect nearly 5,000 acres of natural habitat within city limits. Rebecca Williams has more:

Transcript

One of the biggest cities in the US has released a plan to protect nearly
5,000 acres of natural habitat within city limits. Rebecca Williams
has more:


Cities are some of the last places you’d expect to find good wildlife
habitat. But Chicago officials have mapped out 100 habitat sites within the
city. These are remnants of prairie, savanna, dunes and wetlands that
either escaped development or have potential to be restored.


Kathy Dickhut is with Chicago’s planning department. She says the city
needed the habitat plan to maintain green spaces for migratory birds and
other wildlife.


“Unless you know that you have all these things you’re kind of hit or
miss-managing things and you can’t really manage to improve the system.”


Dickhut says when the city recently revamped its zoning codes, these habitat
areas were zoned as natural areas. That means they’ll be set aside strictly
as wildlife habitat: no buildings or ball fields can be put on the same
spaces.


For the Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links