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

Related Links

Epa to Loosen Aluminum Rules?

The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing a new rule
on aluminum production that could trade one kind of
pollution for another. Dustin Dwyer reports that some are
skeptical of the plan:

Transcript

The Environmental Protection Agency is proposing a new rule
on aluminum production that could trade one kind of
pollution for another. Dustin Dwyer reports that some are
skeptical of the plan:


When you make aluminum for vehicles, there’s a leftover
sludge that can include some toxic chemicals. The EPA wants
to loosen regulations on that sludge.


It says that could encourage more auto manufacturers to use
aluminum instead of steel in vehicle bodies, and since
aluminum is lighter than steel, those vehicles would burn
less gas. Don McKenzie of the Union of Concerned Scientists
says he’s not sure it’s a good idea:


“Aluminum can help to get us more efficient vehicles. But we
shouldn’t need to be changing the rules around aluminum
production to get aluminum into vehicles.”


McKenzie says if the government imposed stricter fuel
economy standards, and kept the rules on aluminum sludge in
place, more automakers would be forced to use aluminum
anyway.


For the Environment Report, I’m Dustin Dwyer.

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

Related Links

Growers Cover Up Local Produce

  • If the hydroponics trend continues, strawberries could be available locally everywhere. (Photo courtesy of the USDA)

It’s the middle of winter and you’re craving some fresh,
juicy strawberries. Go to your local grocery store and
you’ll find lots of packaged strawberries shipped from the
west coast or down south. For locally grown strawberries,
you have to wait till June if you live in the Midwest. But
that’s starting to change. Jennifer Guerra has the story:

Transcript

It’s the middle of winter and you’re craving some fresh,
juicy strawberries. Go to your local grocery store and
you’ll find lots of packaged strawberries shipped from the
west coast or down south. For locally grown strawberries,
you have to wait till June if you live in the Midwest. But
that’s starting to change. Jennifer Guerra has the story:


I like strawberries. A lot. There’s strawberry rhubarb pie
for starters, strawberry and spinach salad, strawberry
shortcake. But I’ve been on this kick lately of trying to
buy only locally-grown produce, which is admittedly hard to do when you
live in the Midwest, especially with strawberries. Most of
the year, they’re shipped in from Florida and California,
but there is one place in Michigan were you can still pick
strawberries as late as October.


(Guerra:) “The redder the better…that’s too green”


It’s snowing out. I’ve got on the winter coat, the hat, the gloves,
and I’m picking strawberries with Kelly Bowerman.


(Guerra:) “So, which one is this?”


(Bowerman:) “This is a tribute. We have aroma, diamante, and
tribute. Aroma is a nice big berry, diamante’s even a bigger berry,
but it just don’t turn red, it’s oranged-colored, and tribute is smaller with a lot more
flavor.”


(Guerra:) “Alright, let’s get all three. Let’s get a
variety.”


Bowerman calls his strawberries three finger berries, which
he says are roughly the same size as the ones shipped in
from California


(Bowerman and Guerra try strawberries)


And frankly, the strawberries better taste
good, seeing as how Bowerman spent 60,000 dollars on them.


Well, not on the actual berries themselves, but on the
hydroponics system he uses to grow the berries. With
hydroponics, he still grows his strawberries outside, but
instead of planting them in the ground, the runners sit in
pots above the ground in a solution of warm water and
minerals. And since there’s no soil, the strawberries can
grow from June to October without the roots freezing over at
the first sign of cold weather. Still, there’s only so much
a hydroponics system can do on its own:


“He’s gonna find out that people want strawberries at
Christmastime, and so the next step will be to put a
greenhouse over that system and then we have 12 months.”


Merle Jensen is a professor of plant science at the
University of Arizona and he knows his hydroponics. He
knows growers all across the country who’ve started moving
their hydroponics systems inside greenhouses so they can
artificially light the crops. That way, they can produce
year round. But wait, there’s more:


“All of our leafy vegetables – high value fruits like
strawberries – will all be under cover in the next 5 years.
I’m sure of that. It’s a rapid expansion, not only in the
United States, but we see it in Canada, Mexico. So, this is the wave
of the future.”


A future that Jensen swears will taste delicious:


“You know what? I can say that because we can control the
nutrition, the salinity within the root system such that we can
program that product to have more acid and more sugars and better
flavor, and we can do that through hydroponics at will. And local growing is
becoming bigger and bigger all the time. It’s just got an
image of being better.”


Of course in the Midwest, “local” is still pretty relative.
Our Michigan farmer, Kelly Bowerman, says he gets people
from up to 50 miles away to pick his strawberries:


“One guy bought $28 worth of strawberries, and he said that ain’t
no big deal cause it cost me $40 worth of gas to
get here and back.”


And he’ll have to continue putting in that kind of travel
time if he wants to eat locally grown strawberries in the
middle of winter. Unless of course Jensen’s right and
hydroponic greenhouse systems really are the wave of the
future. If so, it might not be too long before Bowerman’s
strawberries show up year round at your supermarket.


Oh, and by the way, I liked the tribute strawberries the
best. They were my favorite.


For the Environment Report, I’m Jennifer Guerra.

Related Links

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.

Related Links

Seed Bank Hopes to Save Trees in Peril

  • Examples of ash tree seeds that are part of the collection effort. (Photo by Lester Graham)

People have been saving seeds for thousands of years. Gardeners save
seeds of their favorite plants. Governments save seeds to protect
their food crops. Now, some people are freezing the seeds from trees.
That’s because the trees are being destroyed by an insect pest.
Rebecca Williams reports they’re hoping a gene bank will protect the
trees’ DNA and some day help bring the trees back:

Transcript

People have been saving seeds for thousands of years. Gardeners save
seeds of their favorite plants. Governments save seeds to protect
their food crops. Now, some people are freezing the seeds from trees.
That’s because the trees are being destroyed by an insect pest.
Rebecca Williams reports they’re hoping a gene bank will protect the
trees’ DNA and some day help bring the trees back:


Seeds are a pretty amazing little package. They might be small, but
they’re tough. They can live through very dry and very cold
conditions.


(Sound of seed being shaken out of a paper bag)


These seeds are from ash trees. In some parts of the Upper Midwest and
Ontario, ash trees have been wiped out. The seeds are all that’s left.
That’s because of the emerald ash borer. It’s a tiny green beetle that
got into the US in cargo shipped from China. So far, the beetles have
killed 20 million ash trees. No one’s been able to stop the beetles
from spreading.


David Burgdorf works for a lab with the US Department of Agriculture.
He says people might not even know they had ash trees until the trees
got attacked:


“If your lawn was filled with the ash tree and you had all this great
shade and your energy bills were low, but now the ash tree’s gone, you
only miss it when it’s gone.”


Burgdorf says a lot of people love ash trees for their gold and purple
fall colors. They grow fast and hold up well under ice storms. Native
American tribes depend on black ash for making baskets and medicine.


David Burgdorf is trying to make sure ash trees won’t disappear completely
if the beetle spreads across the country. He’s gathering ash seeds
sent in by volunteers. He’s hoping to build a collection that
represents the entire ash tree gene pool:


“We want to try not to have to bring something back. We don’t want it
to be extinct. It’s important we at least save the seed so we can maybe cross
it, or do something, breed in resistance to the tree and have it
available to come back.”


Burgdorf says he thinks of the seeds as an investment for the future.
The seeds are definitely being treated like a precious commodity.
They’re sorted and they’re X-rayed to make sure the living embryos in
the seeds haven’t been damaged.


Then, the very best seeds in the bunch are off to a high security
government vault:


“We kind of joke that it’s the Fort Knox for seeds.”


Dave Ellis is the seed curator at the National Center for Genetic
Resources Preservation. It’s a giant seed bank. Ellis says the ash
seeds are dehydrated and frozen at 0 degrees Fahrenheit. These steps
put the seeds into a deep sleep:


“In a dehydrated state, degradation of DNA happens much more slowly,
over a course of tens of years or hundreds of years.”


Ellis says the ash seeds should be viable for at least 25 years, if not
longer. He says researchers might be able to use the stored genetic
material to breed new pest-resistant ash trees in the future. Ellis
sees gene banks as a safeguard against a world that’s changing fast.


Scientists say wild plants and crops we depend on will face many new
threats. Climate change might bring more drought.
Escalating global trade could mean importing more pests.


Deb McCullough studies insect pests at Michigan State University. She
says any time you import cargo, you’re running the risk of also
importing pests that can run up huge bills. She says in North America,
one of the big concerns is imports from China:


“If you look at the latitude where China occurs, if you look at the
northern and southern latitude and you overlay that on top of the US and
Canada, it matches up almost perfectly. So you can figure that pretty
much any kind of climate or habitat you find in China, there’s going to
be something similar in the US.”


McCullough says not everything that gets in will turn out to be a pest,
but she says as China’s huge trade surplus with the US grows, there’s a
greater risk more pests will come in.


She says there are some new regulations in place, but restricting
international shipping is a tricky proposition. McCullough says seed
collecting might be one way to preserve plants we rely on:


“People who are molecular biologists, the gene jockeys, have gotten
very good at enhancing or producing resistant varieties of different
kinds of plants. So, that may be something that becomes an option in the
future, maybe not the too distant future.”


McCullough points out there will be serious debate about introducing a
genetically modified tree into the wild. Some people don’t like the
idea of manipulating the genetic makeup of plants or animals.


There are a lot of questions about what might be done with the frozen
seeds, but the seed collectors say regardless, they need to bank up the
DNA of plants that we’re in danger of losing.


For the Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

Scientists and Evangelicals in One Accord

Some scientists are joining with some Christian evangelicals to convince politicians that
global warming is a real threat. Chuck Quirmbach reports:

Transcript

Some scientists are joining with some Christian evangelicals to convince politicians that
global warming is a real threat. Chuck Quirmbach reports:


About thirty scientists and religious leaders have teamed up. One of them is Calvin
DeWitt. He’s president of the Academy of Evangelical Scientists and Ethicists. DeWitt
says when the partnership was first discussed last year, he thought there would be tension
between the researchers and the religious community:


“In fact the opposite was found, there was a tremendous concord between the secular
scientific people and the evangelicals. The concord was the agreement that we had to
move forward fully to care for the creation.”


DeWitt says the scientists pushed for using the term “creation,” as a way to include both
people and the rest of the biosphere.


But another group of evangelicals says the partnership creates a false impression of
growing consensus in the religious community about global warming.


For the Environment Report, I’m Chuck Quirmbach

Related Links

Scientists Work to Save Odd Creatures

  • A baby slender loris, native to Sri Lanka. It has excellent night vision. (Photo courtesy of Zoological Society of London)

Scientists at the London Zoo have launched an effort to save some of the oddest animals on Earth. Rebecca
Williams reports most of them aren’t well-protected:

Transcript

Scientists at the London Zoo have launched an effort to save some of the oddest animals on Earth. Rebecca
Williams reports most of them aren’t well-protected:


We all know about rhinos and pandas, But there’s also the hairy-nosed wombat, the golden-rumped
elephant shrew and the pygmy hippo. Most of them have faces as strange as their names.


Jonathan Baillie is the project’s lead researcher. He says the animals that made the list are both one of a
kind and on the verge of going extinct.


“The solenodon is a creature that’s like a giant shrew that injects venom into its prey, the long-eared
jerboa’s like a miniature kangaroo that lives in the Gobi Desert, and it has enormous ears. The reason
they’re so different is they represent entire lineages so they have few close relatives and that’s why it’s so
important we conserve them because if they’re gone there’s just nothing like them.”


Baillie says many of the animals are small, and have flown under the radar of other conservation efforts.


For the Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

Blazing New Atv Trails in Parkland

  • Advocates of special trails for ATV riding say the trails would reduce environmental damage from uncontrolled use. (Photo by Stephanie Hemphill)

Managers at state parks across the country are scrambling to figure out how to deal with a
rising demand for trails for All-Terrain Vehicles. Stephanie Hemphill reports park
managers are finding it’s not easy to satisfy both fans who have fun on four wheel drive
vehicles and people who want a quieter time in the park:

Transcript

Managers at state parks across the country are scrambling to figure out how to deal with a
rising demand for trails for All-Terrain Vehicles. Stephanie Hemphill reports park
managers are finding it’s not easy to satisfy both fans who have fun on four wheel drive
vehicles and people who want a quieter time in the park:


As the name suggests, All-Terrain Vehicles are built to travel rough. ATVs power over
rocks and logs. Their go-anywhere knobby tires grip the land and take their riders just
about anywhere they want to go, and a lot of them want to go to public parks.


Whether it’s forests, dunes, bogs or a desert, riders say four-wheeling can be a fun way to
get out into nature. The vehicles are popular. Dealers are selling close to a million ATVs
every year, and sales are growing steadily. With that many people looking for a place to
play, states are scrambling to accommodate them.


In Minnesota, the state decided a long ATV trail might be a good way to attract tourism
dollars to a struggling rural area in the state.


Ron Sluka jumped at the idea. He’s the trail coordinator for a local ATV club. He’d been
wanting for years to build a trail in his area. Then he heard the state would pay for a
“destination” trail so well-built and attractive, people would come from all over to ride it.
Sluka thought it would be great news for his area.


He and county officials worked up a plan, but when it hit the local news, Sluka says a
few people raised a ruckus:


“The way it was presented to the people, eminent domain would take over in cases if
need be, and there were going to be up to 20 feet of your land taken for this trail. None
of the above is true, totally none of it is true, absolutely zero. But it’s too late: once
things are rolling, it’s rolling.”


Sluka says now, it’s hard to get a rational discussion of the issues. Beyond property rights
issues and worries about the ATVs being too loud, there are other concerns:


“The residents have kind of been left out of the loop.”


That’s Deb Pomroy. She lives near the proposed ATV trail.


Pomroy says most of her neighbors don’t mind the local ATV riders. It’s that idea of
drawing ATVs from all over the state that freaks them out, and Pomroy has her own reasons
for opposing a trail here, where the Cloquet River has its beginning: wood turtles.
Pomroy is a biologist. She says this area is a refuge for the turtles. They’re endangered in
most of their range, and listed as a threatened species in Minnesota.


Wood turtles bury their eggs in sandy soil. Pomroy says they would love to bury their
eggs in soil disturbed by ATVs, but the eggs wouldn’t survive:


“Even stepping on a nest, which is buried in soil, don’t know there are eggs there, is
enough to destroy the eggs.”


The trail is on hold for now, while county officials and ATV riders try to come up with
an alternative. Concern about damage to sensitive environmental areas is one of the chief
reasons many environmentalists don’t like the idea of letting ATVs into parks.


Jason Kiely is with Wildlands CPR, a national non-profit group that works to prevent off-
road vehicle damage on public land. He says fights over ATV trails are inevitable, as
long as public agencies don’t involve all park users in a comprehensive planning process.


“Primarily because off-road vehicles affect every other use of the forest so significantly.
So we advocate for doing comprehensive travel and recreation planning, not just trying to
carve off the ATV piece, but multi-stakeholder planning efforts that offer something to
everyone.”


Kiely says the US Forest Service and many state agencies have a lot of work to do, to
find the right balance between preserving nature and allowing ATV riders to have their
fun on public land


For the Environment Report, I’m Stephanie Hemphill.

Related Links

Feds Say No to Private Developers

For most of the last century, the federal
government has engaged in a practice known as “land
swapping.” That’s where the federal government sells
or trades land with private property owners. In recent
years, land swapping has become increasingly controversial
as developers build neighborhoods on previously undeveloped
public land. But one federal agency has put an end to the
practice. Some conservationists hope this recent development
represents a new era for the protection of federally-owned
land. Matt Shafer Powell reports:

Transcript

For most of the last century, the federal
government has engaged in a practice known as “land
swapping.” That’s where the federal government sells
or trades land with private property owners. In recent
years, land swapping has become increasingly controversial
as developers build neighborhoods on previously undeveloped
public land. But one federal agency has put an end to the
practice. Some conservationists hope this recent development
represents a new era for the protection of federally-owned
land. Matt Shafer Powell reports:


In the 1930s and 40s the federal government used eminent domain, or the threat of it, to
seize land all over the country. It bought up the land to build dams to make electricity.
One of the biggest projects took place in the Southeastern US. That’s where the federal
government created the Tennessee Valley Authority and flooded much of the Tennessee
River Valley. What was once deep gullies and hillsides became lakes and reservoirs
surrounded by forests. The TVA still owns about 300,000 acres of undeveloped land
throughout the region. For most of the last seventy years, the public has used this land
for recreation and conservation. Billy Minser is a wildlife biologist. He says the public
is very protective of that land:


“It provides outstanding public resource for recreation and beauty, it gives people a place to
rekindle the human spirit, a place to relax, hunt, fish, camp, bird watch or maybe to sit
home and think about how pretty the lakes are.”


In 2003, the TVA angered conservationists like Minser when it traded some of that land
to a residential developer, who built an upscale subdivision on it, and it happened again
last year with another swatch of pristine lakeshore property. Minser claims those deals
betrayed the public, but they also betrayed those families who lost their land to the
government years ago:


“If the government takes your house and bulldozes it down because it’s not enough value
and then sells it to me so I can build another house on it in the same place. Is that right?
That’s wrong. That is absolutely wrong and the public’s done with it.”


Land exchanges are nothing new. Federal agencies like the US Forest Service and the
Bureau of Land Management have been swapping land with private property owners and
state and local governments for decades. The practice is often used to fill in holes in
national forests or get rid of land that the government can’t use. Glenn Collins is with the
Public Lands Foundation. In some cases, he says the feds end up with more and better
land, but that means a lot of previously untouched land ends up in the hands of
developers:


“The federal lands that are placed into private ownership invariably go into development.
Either the land, the large blocks are subdivided into smaller blocks on paper, there may
be roads, improvements, it’ll be put up for sale.”


Over the years, the public has become increasingly wary of these land swaps. In the
Tennessee Valley, public outcry about the deals eventually forced a change in the TVA’s
philosophy. The agency’s Board of Directors recently voted to approve a new policy that
bans the sale or trade of TVA land to private residential developers:


“All those in favor of the committee’s policy on land, say aye.”


“Aye.”


“Opposed?”


“No.”
That one dissenting vote came from board member Bill Baxter, demonstrating the fact
that not everyone is wild about the ban. In explaining his “no” vote, Baxter echoed the
sentiments of economic development officials who worry that an all-out ban on
residential development will compromise their chances of attracting people and money to
the region. Baxter used the example of rural communities that would normally have a
hard time attracting industry:


“Perhaps their best hope for doing some economic development and increasing the tax
base so they can improve the schools for their kids and their roads and their health care is
to have some high-end residential development. It’s a beautiful part of the country and
we’re fortunate that a lot of people want to retire here.”


In the end, Baxter’s claims that residential development is economic development failed
to resonate with either the public or his colleagues on the board. After the vote at the
TVA’s board meeting, Michael Butler of the Tennessee Wildlife Federation called the
new policy a “monumental accomplishment.”


“I think it’s also part of a sound quality-of-life and tax policy into the future to look at
how we use conservation lands to really develop a sustainable way to have a growing
economy, which has got to be part of the equation, and to have a place where these
people can go enjoy themselves that isn’t in front of a television set all the time.”


The fact that the government used eminent domain to acquire a lot of the TVA’s land
means the people in the region are passionately vigilant about what happens to it, but the
public’s passion for land isn’t exclusive to the Tennessee Valley. And so the decisions
made here could have a long-term effect on the way the government approaches future
land exchanges throughout the country.


For the Environment Report, I’m Matt Shafer Powell.

Related Links

Cougars Creep Into Suburbia

Wildlife biologists say cougars are gradually moving from the Mountain
West into Midwestern states. Usually the large cats avoid people, but in
one suburban neighborhood residents are worried. They say they’ve
spotted a cougar in their backyards six times in the last two years. They’re
worried about their pets. They’re worried about their kids. Bob Allen
reports:

Transcript

Wildlife biologists say cougars are gradually moving from the Mountain
West into Midwestern states. Usually the large cats avoid people, but in
one suburban neighborhood residents are worried. They say they’ve
spotted a cougar in their backyards six times in the last two years. They’re
worried about their pets. They’re worried about their kids. Bob Allen
reports:


On a June morning two years ago, David Hanawalt was hunched over a
flower bed in his back yard loosening the soil with a hand rake. He says
he caught something out of the corner of his eye moving toward him:


“I started to prepare myself because it seemed like a large dog that was
making a beeline for me.”


(Allen:)”As if it was going to jump on you?”


“Yeah. And as soon as I stood up and turned it veered off. And the way it
ran, the way it moved, and its ears, I swear it was a cat.”


The cat disappeared into a patch of brushy woods behind his
house. Hanawalt says he became more convinced it was a cougar when his wife, T, saw
a big cat with a long tail sauntering across a neighbor’s blacktop driveway.


“…And it was just walking up like this. Just walking up. And then it went
just right off into those woods. Casually. It wasn’t in any hurry.”


The creature’s nonchalance is what has people in this northern Michigan
neighborhood worried. Some of them have read David Baron’s book
Beast in the Garden. It recounts how people have built their houses in
foothills surrounding Boulder, Colorado, right into prime mountain lion
country, then they saw cougars coming into their yards, taking their dogs and cats.
Eventually, a cougar killed a high school boy when he was jogging on a
wooded trail outside Boulder.


There are significant differences between the situations in Colorado and
Michigan, but author David Baron says if people are seeing a cougar and
it’s not running away from them, and in fact begins to approach them, then
that can be a warning sign:


“That’s what was seen in Boulder in the years before there was a fatal
attack not too far from Boulder. That’s what was seen in Missoula,
Montana back in the late ’90s before a little boy was attacked who did
survive. But again, if there are multiple reports of what is clearly a cougar
in one neighborhood, it’s probably worth looking into.”


Back in the northern Michigan subdivision Patty Barrons lives in the
house at the end of the cul-de-sac. It backs right up to a stretch of woods.
She was walking up the street one early morning last August when she
spied a big cat heading into her back yard. She took off running for her
front door because she remembered she’d left her housecat on the back
deck:


“…And I ran through the house, and onto my deck and down the two steps.
And went, I can’t believe I did this, it’s so embarrassing but I went, shoo,
shoo.”


It didn’t shoo.


Instead, Barrons says, it turned and took two steps toward her. She took
two steps back onto the porch. Barrons describes the animal as
enormous. She says she and the big cat watched each other from a
distance of fifteen feet for about half a minute:


“The face when we looked at each other eye to eye I felt that I was looking
at, I mean I knew I was looking at a lion. I knew I was looking at a lion,
there was no doubt. It was very muscular. It never crouched down or
anything so I didn’t feel threatened. But it stared at me and then, um, it
turned and walked around my flower garden, behind the tennis courts
and kept going.”


Patty Barrons keeps a careful eye out when she takes her early morning
walks, and she won’t work in her garden in the early morning or
late evening hours anymore.


(Sound of model airplanes buzzing)


Next to her house is an open field where kids play soccer and neighbors
walk their dogs, and its where T Hanawalt’s sons fly the remote controlled
model airplanes they love to build, but she won’t let them go out by
themselves anymore:


“Day or night. I mean they used to run around this neighborhood and play
with all the children at night and we’re not doing that anymore. I just, I
can’t have that it’s too scary. In fact, I’m looking to move.”


State wildlife officials won’t come out to investigate unless there’s clear
evidence of what could be a cougar. That means a photo, a paw print,
maybe some scat or droppings from the animal.


The people in this neighborhood didn’t get any of that, but now they have
their cell phone cameras handy.


For the Environment Report, I’m Bob Allen.

Related Links