Turn Off the Lights on Saturday Night

  • Photograph of illuminated incandescent-replacement fluorescent bulb. (Source: Jdorwin at Wikimedia Commons)

On Saturday night from 8 to 9 the World Wildlife
Fund is asking you to turn off your lights for Earth Hour.
Lester Graham reports sitting in the dark is supposed to
make you think about how you contribute to global warming:

Transcript

On Saturday night from 8 to 9 the World Wildlife
Fund is asking you to turn off your lights for Earth Hour.
Lester Graham reports sitting in the dark is supposed to
make you think about how you contribute to global warming:

The World Wildlife Fund is organizing the Earth Hour. Some have questioned whether
what some might consider a “publicity stunt” will really make a difference. Joe Pouliot is
with the group.

“Well I wouldn’t characterize this as a stunt. Climate change, unfortunately, hasn’t been getting a huge amount of attention. But because of the activities of Earth Hour, people are really beginning to focus on the challenges of climate change.”

Earth Hour wants you to shut off your lights for an hour because lot of electricity comes
from coal-burning power plants. They put out a lot of carbon dioxide, a main
greenhouse gas. Pouliot says people, organizations and cities on six continents are
participating in Earth Hour, including the cities of Toronto, Altlanta, Chicago, Phoenix
and San Francisco.

For The Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.

Related Links

Thaw and Order

  • Melting glaciers as seen from aboard the Fairweather Express II in Glacier Bay, Alaska (Photo by John Ryan)

A National Park might not be the first place
you’d expect to turn into a crime scene. But John Ryan
found one – of sorts – on a boat touring Alaska’s Glacier
Bay National Park:

Transcript

A National Park might not be the first place
you’d expect to turn into a crime scene. But John Ryan
found one – of sorts – on a boat touring Alaska’s Glacier
Bay National Park:

(music)

Scene of the crime. Glacier Bay National Park. 9 o’clock on a sunny Saturday morning.

The crime: Global warming. You know: ice caps melting. Sea level rising. Deserts and
disease spreading. Scientists say it’s big, very big.

(music)

Intergovernmental investigators have ID’d the perpetrator: it’s us. Emissions from fossil
fuels like coal and oil have started heating the earth.

But here on the Fairweather Express II, you’d never know it. Park ranger Kevin Richards
is at the mic, entertaining passengers as we cruise past mile-wide glaciers
in the sun.

“That snow fell when Thomas Jefferson was signing the Declaration of
Independence.”

Richards tells the crowd how the glaciers have retreated 60 miles in the past 200 years.

But he hasn’t once mentioned global warming.

In the audience, Anchorage pathologist James Tiesinga smells a rat.

“The rangers seem very reluctant to say the words ‘global warming’, they skirt
the issue of why the glaciers are receding. I can’t help but wonder if the Park Service
has communicated the message to its employees, ‘don’t bring this up, it’s a hot topic’.”

And I notice the visitors’ newsletter put out by the park talks in depth about the changing
glaciers, but fails to mention that the climate is being changed by humans.

During a break in the naturalist’s stand-up routine, Tiesinga asks why there has been no
mention of global warming? Are we witnessing a coverup?

(music)

As huge chunks of ancient ice tumble into the bay, the Park Ranger, Kevin Richards, says, no,
there’s no censorship of climate science.

“Until very recently, yeah, if you’re working for the government, you
probably didn’t talk a lot about it. But now it’s okay, it’s an open forum right now.”

He says he’ll get to the connection
between melting glaciers and a warming earth near the end of his talk, but it’s a lot more
complicated than you might think.

“We just can’t talk about tidewater glaciers the same way we do about
terrestrial glaciers. It’s not the same process.”

Here’s why it’s not the same: tidewater glaciers have snouts that stick out into the ocean. Terrestrial glaciers are
land-locked. Richards goes on to say that land-locked glaciers in the mountains above
Glacier Bay are shrinking under a warming climate. But he says the dramatic loss of 60
miles of ice from Glacier Bay itself is not a sign of global warming.

(music)

To fact-check the on-board nature talk, I called up Roman Motycka.
He studies glaciers at the University of Alaska-Fairbanks’ Geophysical
Institute. He confirmed that global warming is hitting most Alaskan
glaciers hard.

“90% of the glaciers in South-Eastern Alaska are wasting away, and that’s
complicated, but primarily due to global warming.”

So why aren’t tourists in Glacier Bay hearing that when they witness fall
ice chunks fall into the ocean?

“It’s really complex there. Here’s what happened when all
that ice got lost.”

Motycka explains that tidewater glaciers have their own cycles of
advance and retreat. In a nutshell, when the snout of a glacier ends up floating in deep water, it becomes inherently prone to calving – that is, dropping icebergs – independent of the climate. And that’s what’s happened in Glacier Bay. So, in other words…

“Your naturalist was right, the terrestrial glaciers are the
ones that are more important to look at in terms of straight climate
change.”

(music)

Back on the Fairweather Express II, Park Ranger Kevin Richards
finishes his day at the mic talking about global energy consumption and
making a plea for people to protect the environment back home,
wherever they come from.

So in the end, park rangers are still the nature lovers in funny green outfits you might
remember from your childhood. And as this episode of Thaw and Glacier comes to a
close, all is well in Glacier Bay. Except for a little thing called…

(music)

…global warming.

For the Environment Report… I’m John Ryan.

Related Links

Enviros and Coal-Fired Power

  • City Water Light and Power of Springfield, Illinois compromised with environmentalists to build a cleaner power plant and supplement supplies with wind energy rather than fight through the permitting process. (Photo by Lester Graham)

There are around 100 coal-burning power plants
on the drawing boards. Many of them won’t be built.
In some cases environmental groups will fight to
make sure they don’t get built. But, Lester
Graham reports, one coal-burning power plant is
being built with the blessings of the
environmentalists nearby:

Transcript

There are around 100 coal-burning power plants on the drawing boards. Many of
them won’t be built. In some cases environmental groups will fight to make sure
they don’t get built. But, Lester Graham reports, one coal-burning power plant is
being built with the blessings of the environmentalists nearby:


Usually, when a utility wants to build a new coal-burning power plant, the fight is on. The
utility is challenged by environmental groups every step of the permitting process.
Then, more times than not, the utility and the environmentalists take the fight to the
courts. It means years of delays and millions of dollars of legal bills, but that didn’t
happen here.


Construction workers are erecting the superstructure of a new 500-million dollar
coal-burning power plant. This power plant is scheduled to go online in two years.
When it’s complete, it’ll use the latest technology to reduce the nastiest pollutants
from its smokestack: sulfur dioxide, nitrous oxides and mercury. And this power
plant is much more efficient.


Jay Bartlett is the chief utilities engineer with City Water Light and Power in
Springfield, Illinois. He says compared to the utility’s older power plants next door,
the new plant will burn about 20% less coal to produce the same amount of
electricity.


“It takes about 1.4 pounds of coal to make a kilowatt of electricity from that plant
over there. This plant will be in the .85 range.”


And that will mean electricity bills for ratepayers won’t have to go up. It also means
the net amount of greenhouse gases is reduced. That makes environmentalists
smile.


And that’s no accident. Jay Bartlett says after being contacted by the local Sierra Club,
the power company and the environmentalists decided to talk:


“It was our goal when we sat down with the Sierra Club, saying, ‘You know we can
fight this out and it will cost both sides lots and lots of money, but will anything good
come out of this in the end?’ And we both decided that something better could come
out of spending those dollars. And what that was investing in wind, investing in
better pollution control, products for this plant to make it as clean as it can possibly be
and move forward. ”


No one really thought this would happen. Not the utility, not the regulators, and not
the environmentalists.


(Sound of coffee shop)


At a downtown coffee shop, Will Reynolds still seems a little surprised. He’s with the
local Sierra Club chapter that worked with Springfield’s City Water Light and Power:


“Yeah, at the start of this I thought there was no chance for any kind of agreement or
compromise. But by the end of it, we had an agreement that reduced the CO2 to
Kyoto Treaty levels, we had a utility that was able to build a power plant to have a
stable, efficient power supply — which was what they were looking for as a small
municipal utility — and in the end, I think it was a win-win for everybody.”


What the two sides agreed to is this: the best off-the-shelf equipment to control
pollution better than the law requires, and to offset the CO2 produced by the plant,
the utility signed an agreement with an Iowa wind-power company to provide part of
Springfield’s electricity:


“Springfield is a small, pretty conservative town that just took a huge step forward
and showed what can be done realistically to reduce our global warming emissions.
And we were able to do it and still provide for our power, still have affordable, reliable
power for the entire city. So, if Springfield can do it, then other cities can do it.”


The state regulating agency, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency,
applauded the efforts. Illinois is a coal-producing state and has been encouraging
power companies to clean up their plants so that coal can still be used without as many
of the pollution worries. IEPA Director Doug Scott says the Springfield utility’s efforts
will be a model for other power companies:


“I mean, all of the things that they did and the things that they worked out with Sierra
Club, the extra reductions that they’re getting over and above what they would have
had to have done in a normal permitting sense. I mean, that they were looking at
trying to be good stewards of the environment as well as being responsive to their
ratepayers as well.”


And Scott says that’s key. Because it’s plentiful and domestic, coal is not going
away. Scott says this can work for not just municipal electric utilities, but private
power companies can keep shareholders happy, keep ratepayers happy and keep
the skies clearer by updating power plants to work more efficiently, seriously reduce
the emissions from coal, and do what they can to offset greenhouse gas emissions
until technology is found that can clean up CO2.


For the Environment Report, this is Lester Graham.

Related Links

Great Lakes Record Lows

  • Lower water levels on the Great Lakes make some channels such as the Muskegon River too shallow for big freighters to enter fully loaded. (Photo by Lester Graham)

The Great Lakes are hitting new record low water levels. The water is so low that
big 1000-foot cargo ships are running aground. There’s debate about
whether this is just part of the historic ups and downs of the Great Lakes, or if it’s the
effects of global warming. Lester Graham reports from Lake Michigan’s Muskegon
River, a trouble spot for some of the big ships:

Transcript

The Great Lakes are hitting new record low water levels. The water is so low that
big 1000-foot cargo ships are running aground. There’s debate about
whether this is just part of the historic ups and downs of the Great Lakes, or if it’s the
effects of global warming. Lester Graham reports from Lake Michigan’s Muskegon
River, a trouble spot for some of the big ships:


Here at the end of the pier next to the lighthouse, it’s cold, it’s icy and it’s windy. And
it’s hard to imagine a ship navigating its way into this channel, but ships do on a
regular basis to bring coal to a power plant. This year, however, some of the ships
have ended up aground here simply because of lower lake levels and more sediment
in the channel:


“There’s been three this summer here in Muskegon. They go hard up on the sand.”


Dennis Donahue is the marine superintendent for the National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration’s Lake Michigan field station at Muskegon, Michigan. He
says this year’s groundings of cargo ships just hasn’t happened that often in the
past:


“Well, we haven’t had a grounding here, certainly in the last 15 years due to water
levels.”


Lester Graham: “So what’s happening here? What’s going on?”


Donahue: “Well, there’s a couple of things, we’ve got the water levels dropping and
then we’ve got some weather patterns that are carrying sediment to the mouth of the
Muskegon River. So, those two compound and create shoal areas.”


So lower water and a rising bottom mean channels are more shallow. That means
ships have to carry less cargo, and that costs the shippers reportedly a million
dollars per ship per year.


Scientists have been monitoring the dropping lake levels for close to a decade now.
At NOAA’s Great Lakes Environmental Research Lab, Deputy Director Cynthia
Sellinger says she’s been seeing a trend in the weather that’s causing the problem:


“We’re having a lot less precipitation and a lot more evaporation. And that’s
impacting the water levels on the lake.”


Less snow pack and rain mean less water filling the lakes, and with warmer winters
Sellinger says there’s less ice cover to protect the lakes from massive evaporation.
Historically, about 50% of the lakes’ surfaces have been covered by ice. These
days, it’s more like ten to 20%. Cold air hits the warmer water and
carries it away. For Lake Superior alone, a one-inch drop is more than 500 billion
gallons. During the past decade, Superior has lost nearly 13 trillion gallons.


“The upper lakes, Superior, Michigan and Huron, are very close to their record low.
So, it’s approaching an extreme. Superior reached its record low in 1926 and just
this year it broke the record low for September. So, 2007 now is a new record low
for Lake Superior. Lakes Michigan and Huron are approaching their record low.”


Sellinger and her colleagues are not ready to say global warming is causing the
lower lake levels. It might just be a part of a long cycle of ups and downs of the lakes.
But the lower water levels do fit some of the computer model predictions about
global warming.


Lower lake levels causing problems for big cargo ships and marinas catering to
recreational boaters are problems enough. But, some environmentalists say if lower
water levels are caused by global warming, the pressures on the water in the Great
Lakes likely are going to get a lot worse. Andy Buchsbaum heads up the National
Wildlife Federation’s Great Lakes office:


“The hidden threat of global warming is that not only does it affect Great Lakes water
levels simply because of increased evaporation or increased temperatures changes
precipitation, but the threat it makes to Great Lakes water levels is even greater.
Because global warming, global climate change, is having massive effects already
and is likely to have even greater effects on water supplies in the Southwest, the
Southeast and all over the country. And as those pressures increase, the pressure
to divert Great Lakes water will increase exponentially.”


We don’t know whether new diversions to dry areas of the country could cause as
much of a problem as less precipitation and more evaporation of the Great Lakes
already do. But, it would certainly aggravate the problem. The effects of water
levels dropping further mean more economic hardship for shipping and tourism. And
environmentalists say ecological damage to coastal habitat that fish and other
wildlife need to survive could be on a scale that’s not been seen on the Great Lakes
in recorded history.


For The Environment Report, I’m Lester Graham.

Related Links

Clean Coal to Use More Water?

Government researchers say more water will be needed for power plants in the future.
Mark Brush reports:

Transcript

Government researchers say more water will be needed for power plants in the future.
Mark Brush reports:


Power plants use a lot of water – often millions of gallons an hour. A lot of that water is
cycled through the plants and released back into lakes and rivers. But there’s also a lot
that is used up – mostly evaporating into the air.


The Department of Energy predicts that energy needs in the U.S. will increase 22% by
2030. The increase in power generation will drive an increase in water consumption.


And researchers at the National Energy Technology Laboratory say a lot more
water will be needed. That’s because of the pressure to build coal-burning power plants
that strip carbon dioxide from their emissions to slow global warming. The researchers
say the technologies needed to do this will use a lot more water. They predict that
freshwater consumption at power plants will increase as much as 50%.


For the Environment Report, I’m Mark Brush.

Related Links

Lcv Releases 2008 Election Guide

  • The 2008 Presidential Primaries Voter Guide "takes a critical look at candidates' plans for dealing with global climate change." (Image courtesy of the LCV)

An environmental group has come out with an online voter guide for the
presidential primaries. Rebecca Williams reports:

Transcript

An environmental group has come out with an online voter guide for the
presidential primaries. Rebecca Williams reports:


The League of Conservation Voters released its Voter Guide to show how
the candidates stack up. They consider the candidates’ voting records
and their plans to tackle the big issues. Everything from Superfund
clean-up to energy. But especially global warming:


David Sandretti is with the League. He says all of the Democratic
candidates have aggressive plans for controlling greenhouse gasses. He
says Senator John McCain comes out way ahead among the Republican
candidates:


“He has a plan, he has supported a plan, he’s been working on this for
years. And his Republican rivals just simply don’t have that kind of
record.”


Sandretti admits candidates without a federal or state voting record
are hard to compare to candidates with a long Congressional record.
But his group considers their records as mayors or governors.


For the Environment Report, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

Food Shortages in a Warmer World?

Three new scientific studies find that agriculture could go into
steep declines in some regions in the coming decades. Julie Grant
reports that the authors of these studies say they’re looking at
complications that until now have not been adequately considered:

Transcript

Three new scientific studies find that agriculture could go into
steep declines in some regions in the coming decades. Julie Grant
reports that the authors of these studies say they’re looking at
complications that until now have not been adequately considered:


Global warming predictions often assume steady changes to the
environment. But these new studies’ authors say previous predictions
fail to account for seasonal extremes of drought or rain. or spreading
weeds and diseases.


Francesco Tubiello is an agricultural expert with NASA. He was a co-
author of all three of the studies published in the Proceedings of the
National Academy of Sciences. Tubiello says previous studies have
found that global warming might actually increase food production. But
these new studies find those gains will be offset by loss of tropical
farmland – and eventually tip the whole world into food shortages.


Tubiello says things could happen suddenly – and that the potential for
bigger, more rapid problems remains largely unexplored.


For the Environment Report, I’m Julie Grant.

Related Links

Experimenting With a Global Warming Garden

  • Todd Forrest at the New York Botanical Garden's Ladies Border Garden. (Photo by Brad Linder)

When you think about global warming, you probably think about polar ice caps
melting and rising sea levels. But climate change is also having a more immediate
effect — on gardeners. As average temperatures rise, many gardeners are finding
they can grow non-native plants in their back yards. Brad Linder visited one public
garden that’s been nicknamed “the global warming garden”:

Transcript

When you think about global warming, you probably think about polar ice caps
melting and rising sea levels. But climate change is also having a more immediate
effect — on gardeners. As average temperatures rise, many gardeners are finding
they can grow non-native plants in their back yards. Brad Linder visited one public
garden that’s been nicknamed “the global warming garden”:


Most gardeners know there are some plants they’ll never be able to grow, because
of the climate where they live. But the Earth’s climate is changing, and that means
plants that normally grow in the southern United States are thriving as far north as
New York City:


“This Japanese Flowering Apricot, prunus mume. This is a plant that’s widely
grown further south. It’s actually native originally to China, but it’s beloved in Japan.”



Todd Forrest is vice president for horticulture at the New York Botanical Garden:


“And so what we’ve found with climate change is that this plant survives, because
the winter temperatures are on average warmer. But because there’s variability in
our local climate, it will often have its flowers burned by frost.”



Forrest is walking through the Ladies Border Garden, an experimental section of the
Botanical Garden designed to demonstrate the impact of climate change on plants.
Forrest sometimes calls the Ladies Border “the global warming garden,” because
most of the plants are species that couldn’t have grown in this area a few decades
ago.


Climate change probably has been affecting plants and gardeners for years. But
Forrest says it’s only recently that people have put two and two together and realized
that unpredictable weather patterns are affecting their herb gardens:


“Gardeners at times suffer the sort of head in the sand syndrome. They’re so
obsessed with and attuned to their individual garden and climate. And we’re all used
to being frustrated by the weather. I think for a long time we all just sort of ascribed
whatever change there was or variability to that darn weather again. Acting up.
Raining when it should be dry. Dry when it should be raining. Cold when it should be
warm.”


In some ways, the Ladies Border Garden shows how exciting global warming can
be for gardeners. You can grow all sorts of exotic plants in your backyard if you don’t
have to deal with the long cold winters you’re used to.


Forrest has been able to get dozens of unusual plants to grow in New York, including
Choysia and even a Himalayan Fan Palm. That’s right, a palm tree growing in New
York City.


But just because you can grow non-native plants doesn’t mean you should. Because
foreign plants can easily become invasive species, killing off local plants.
Marielle Anzelone is a botanist and garden designer. Her specialty is working with
local plants. Today she’s planting a native-species garden in a public park:



“All the plants are going to have little signs in front of them that say what they are,
because it’s meant to be educational. People should see a plant, say oh, it’s
gorgeous. Want it. Oh, it’s vibernum nutem. And then run out to their nursery
and get it.”


Anzelone says many people don’t realize how beautiful local plants are. For
example, she says people often buy wreaths made of Asiatic Bittersweet vines —
even though it’s an invasive species that’s been killing off American Bittersweet:


“And people maybe then who hang the wreath outside on their door. A bird comes
and eats the berries and poops it out in Prospect Park or Central Park. I mean, that
is how these things get around. So it’s not just your world in a vacuum and nothing
comes to your garden. I mean, birds travel, insects travel.”


That’s why, under normal circumstances, gardeners have to be careful what they
plant in their backyards. Because non-native plants have a way of spreading and
competing with local plants, and climate change complicates things by making it
easier for invasive species to spread:


“The thing that keeps me up at night is not global warming. It’s extinction crisis. And I
think people think a lot about extinction as being this big dramatic thing. It’s a fire, it’s
an oil spill. But actually it doesn’t work that way. Extinction happens on a small scale
all the time.”



As the climate changes, Anzelone says she understands that gardeners will want to
try new things. But she says they shouldn’t forget about native plants, which feed
native insects and animals.


The New York Botanical Garden’s Todd Forrest admits that the Ladies Border
Garden is both exciting and disturbing. While he can demonstrate that new plants
will grow in New York, he knows that global warming is also killing off plants that
have lived here for thousands of years.


For the Environment Report, I’m Brad Linder.

Related Links

Cities Brace for Global Warming – Part 2

  • Cities can expand mass transit, getting more cars off the road and giving people more options to help reduce emissions that contribute to global warming. (Photo by Karen Kelly)

Census figures show that more and more North Americans are now living in cities. For those who want to fight climate change, that means changing the way these urban folks live. In the second of a two-part series on climate change, Karen Kelly has the story of one city councilor who’s made that his mission:

Transcript

Census figures show that more and more North Americans are now living in cities. For those who want to fight climate change, that means changing the way these urban folks live. In the second of a two-part series on climate change, Karen Kelly has the story of one city councilor who’s made that his mission:


“We’re at Bronson and Fifth. It’s a four lane roadway into Ottawa.”


Clive Doucet is a city councilor in Ottawa, Canada’s capital. He’s standing about half a block from where he lives:


“This kind of street is a community killer, it’s a planet killer. It’s the fruit of 5,560 years of building cities for cars and not human beings.”


Doucet loves cities, which is why it pains him to see a once-beautiful neighborhood street become, as he calls it, a traffic sewer. It’s loud, it’s polluted, and it’s not safe. Three pedestrians have been killed near this corner in the past five years, and there’ve been many accidents.


Doucet was an activist for a long time, but after running for city council he realized the city has the power to change the climate. It builds the roads and it controls the public transportation:


“Public transit has, every environmentalist knows is one of the main keys to solving the environmental crisis. I mean, 45 to 50 percent of greenhouse gases come out of our use of land and the tailpipes of cars and trucks. We can get rid of most of that and we can not change our lifestyle one bit; in fact, we can make it better.”


Doucet hops on his bike to show what he means. He winds through the traffic and then stops along Ottawa’s five-mile-long light rail track:


“This runs parallel to the road we were just on. It’s a test line. It carries a hundred and 50 passengers every 15 minutes and when we get the two lines up and running, it will carry three times the traffic or more as Bronson and it’s quiet. We’re standing at the station now. You’re like in a church. See the train’s coming. Do you hear any noise? It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”


Doucet’s vision for his city is a comprehensive light rail system. He says it will reduce air and noise pollution, and make the city friendlier for pedestrians and cyclists, but Doucet is thinking about the bigger picture, too. And there, he’s not optimistic. He’s noticed that the winters in Ottawa are warmer now, and that’s disturbing for people because they really embrace winter.


Almost every park has an outdoor hockey rink, and people ice skate, not just for pleasure, but to get around. Doucet says he’s afraid that climate change will destroy what makes his city special:


“It’s incredibly sad. I mean, I’ve skated to work all my life and I live about a block from the canal I take my skates down and I’d skate to work and skate home. And I’ve seen countless marvelous sunrises on the canal. It is difficult to imagine my life without that. Those experiences have given my life poetry.”


Doucet says he’s pretty much given up hope on the federal government. He says they’re too beholden to big industry to really curb the emissions that cause climate change.
But at the local level? He says a lot can be done.


He recently wrote a book, Urban Meltdown: Cities, Climate Change and Politics as Usual. In it, he says it’s time for city residents to get tough:


“Go after your municipal politicians and say, you know something, we want to have a city that’s pedestrian-based, that’s public transit-based and we want you to stop building roads. You can do stuff about your local government and the way you live locally.”


Doucet wouldn’t say it’s easy. Last year, Ottawa signed a contract to expand its light rail system. Then, a new mayor came in and the plan was scrapped. Doucet thinks it will happen eventually, but in the meantime, he’s still fighting the rush hour traffic on his bicycle.


For the Environment Report, I’m Karen Kelly.

Related Links

Songwriter Connects With Kids

  • Joe Reilly and poetry writer Nora sing at a CD release party for Joe's album. (Photo by Chris Reilly)

Singer-songwriter Joe Reilly recently made an album with kids. The songs on the album are all about nature. Reilly discovered that when it comes to writing and singing about nature, some of these kids are wise beyond their years. Kyle Norris has this story:

Transcript

Singer-songwriter Joe Reilly recently made an album with kids. The songs on the album are all about nature. Reilly discovered that when it comes to writing and singing about nature, some of these kids are wise beyond their years. Kyle Norris has this story:


It’s hard to get kids to think outside their own little world. Let alone get them to think about the entire planet. But Joe Reilly seems to have a knack for getting kids to think big. And to talk about something pretty big, nature. He does it with music:


“Realizing the way that music can reach a place in any person, but especially in a kid that is a place of excitement and inspiration, there’s really like a magic there.”


Joe Reilly recently wrote an entire album with kids. He’d ask the kids open-ended questions, like “why is it important to protect the river?” And then he’d weave their answers into lyrics. He had one song with music, but no words. And then he heard a poem written by one of his ten-year old students. The poem by Nora Sinnett blew him out of the water. Reilly asked Nora if she was willing to read the poem over the song’s music.


(Song lyrics): “I am important. I may be only a whisper in a sea of voices. I may be only a blade of grass on a lawn. I may be one flower in a garden, a minnow in an ocean, a grain of sand on a beach, one star in the sky. But I am important. I matter. I stand tall. I am proud.”


She says she wrote the poem one day while she was hanging out in her grandpa’s library and she was just feeling kind of blue:


“I just like, saw a little ray of sunshine in window and I thought wow, that little ray of sunshine is really small but without that little ray of sunshine there wouldn’t be any other bits of sunshine. Then the room would just be dark. It just made me feel like I’m important because like, there’s only one leaf on a tree but without leaves the tree would be really bare. So little things make up big things.”


At a benefit show for the CD, Nora and Joe performed the song together. Afterwards, a mob of children and adults surrounded Nora. Kim Hunter is a poet and writer-in-residence in the Detroit schools. He was one of the people congratulating her.


“She has some really great metaphors in there. She’s a small person but she still, as says in poem, stands tall. And that’s, for a ten-year-old, a pretty sophisticated metaphor, and she employed it in a lot of different situations. It was a good poem.”


Hunter wasn’t the only person who thought it was a good poem. Songwriter Joe Reilly jokes that he’s been writing longer than Nora has been alive. He says he wishes he could write things as profound as Nora’s poem:


“I think there’s a real power in giving kids a voice and they can speak to adults and other kids, in a way we grown folks can’t always do.”


When Joe Reilly was a kid the adults in his life taught him about music and nature. He spent a lot of time exploring both of these things. He says they helped him to feel safe and good. These days, music and nature give him hope, which he says is a welcome change. To the hopelessness he feels about the environment and the future:


“When I can sit and make music with kids about how the beautiful earth is and how we want to celebrate our connections and inter-connections with all living beings. That just takes me beyond that despair, and it anchors me in some kind of hope.”


Reilly says that if he had sat down alone and tried to write a bunch of songs about nature, the songs would have been more serious. And not as fun. And silly. And lighthearted as it was with the kids. Like in this song. Where Joe and the kids invented a word to rhyme with river:


(Song): “Shibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby diver/We got a song about the Huron River/Water is such an important life-giver/We will protect it we will deliver”


For the Environment Report, I’m Kyle Norris.

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